


JK

by engagemachine



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Child Abuse, Codependency, Coercion, Dubious Consent, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, F/M, Manipulation, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Rape/Non-con Elements, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-21
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2019-11-26 17:57:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 5
Words: 60,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18183878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/engagemachine/pseuds/engagemachine
Summary: It's been eleven years. Post-Clockwork AU.Alt: The Joker can't stop thinking about the little girl who got away.





	1. Chapter 1

**Part I**

He would be lying if he said he doesn’t think about her.

How can he fucking _not_?

He remembers the first time he saw her, thinks about it all the time, carefully plucks the hazy-edged memory from his mind like it’s hidden in a corner protected by slivers and shards of sharp glass, and he doesn’t want to cut himself.

Not that he’s ever minded spilling a little blood—or a lot of it, for that matter.  

But in his mind’s eye, she is there. Always there. Always in that room where it all began. So pale and so small; pink-cheeked and shivering from the cold, probably on the verge of frostbite without even knowing it. He remembers—more than anything else from that encounter—the way she stared at him, the way she looked at him, so openly, so… unafraid. She had been wary and unsure, yes, but not _afraid_ of him. Her curiosity far outweighed her fear. Perhaps that’s why he liked her so much, why he still likes her after all these years, why he gives a _damn_ in the first place and can’t stop _wondering_ about her.

What is she like now? What have the hands of time done to her? What has _she_ done to _it_?

He finds himself imagining what she looks like, wonders if her hair is still gold and tangled with ringlets, if her green eyes are still big and round and framed by thick, dark lashes, if she’s tall or short, thin or fat. He wonders if she’s shy or bold, if she is sitting quietly in a corner or standing in the middle of the room, commanding attention to all of those who will freely give it. Does she have hobbies, does she paint or draw or read or write, does she yearn with the need to create and build, or burn with the desire to destroy and destruct, to wreak havoc on the things in this world she doesn’t understand?

Most of all, he wonders if she remembers. If she remembers _him_. Maybe that haunts him—the idea of her remembering. It makes him feel… it makes him _feel_. Do you get that? It makes him _feel._  

He doesn’t know if he wants her to remember him.

Of course he _does_ want her to, but then, a much smaller part of him, a part of him that stays tucked away on some top corner shelf in the marrow of his bones, realizes that if she does remember him, she’ll remember everything else, all the things he put her through and all the things he made her do. And it’s not that he feels _sorry_ for those things, because he _doesn’t_ , and he would do everything over again in much the same way if he had to, but the thing is that he wants her to _like_ him. He doesn’t want her to look back with some newfound semblance of teenage-clarity and realize how stupid and naïve she had been, and suddenly realize that he is a horrible monster, and that she hates him. He doesn’t want that. He doesn’t want that at all.

What he _does_ want makes the hairs on his arms stand on end, makes his throat feel dry and hot and tight, sets the blood in his veins on fire, makes white-hot heat crash over him in dizzying waves because of what he _wants_ and how he wants it, because he wants _,_ he craves, and he _needs_ , and it’s with an intensity that burns him from the inside out.

Because what he wants is for her to need him again, to want him the way he wants her. He wants to feel that same unidentifiable magnetized force that drew them together, because he doesn’t know _what_ he wants from her, just that he wants her again, wants to see her and have her until this forest fire beneath the surface of his skin is wet and sated.

That’s what he wants.

He plans accordingly.

She is a little hard to find, at first; he does everything _but_ flip the whole city upside down and force it to shake out its pockets like its a little punk on the playground who’s stolen _his_ lunch money, and now he wants it back. It’s nothing a little persistence and a little uh, friendly _persuasion_ at the GCPD headquarters can’t solve. People can be so accommodating when the knife’s sharp enough and the angle’s right.

So he does some digging in dark corners, spends some money and hires some people who can do a little digging for him so he doesn’t have to and consequently end up raising red flags. He’s got a friend of a friend of a friend who can pull strings in high places, someone with all the right connections who can get him into all the right places—chief among them, being digitally birthed into the Gotham City public records system as a long-lost uncle twice removed to one _Taylor Borden_.

How strangely satisfying it is to learn her last name after all these years.

Now, he waits. Lies low for a few days, keep his gorgeous mug out of the papers and off the streets where the limelight won’t touch it. It’s maddening, the silence that seems to fall over Gotham in his very public and noticeable absence, and after a while people even seem to relax for a bit, like some heavy burden has been lifted from their shoulders and they can take deep breaths without having to worry about inhaling noxious fumes.

He hates it, but he knows it will be worth it.

When his requests are processed, and his likeness stares knowingly at him from a state-issued ID that reads ‘Joe Kerr’, he knows it’s time.

The leaves are dying slowly. It’s that time of the year. The pavement is littered with the shriveled, gold and red dried-up leftovers of a forgotten summer, and the air is crisp and sharp. The sky is that obnoxiously pretty shade of eggshell blue, without a single cloud to mar its vibrancy. Above him, the sun winks at him as he walks, its rays catching and flickering between skyscrapers that the Joker imagines to be Jenga blocks instead, so fragile and so full of destructive promise if he could just pluck the right block and send the whole thing crashing to the ground. Maybe another day.

He dresses up for the occasion—or perhaps dresses down is the better word, forgoing his usual greasepaint and dyed green hair.

Well—he hadn’t been able to get _all_ the green out, but it will do. The baseball cap will hide most of it, anyway. 

The orphanage is in one of the more upstanding parts of Gotham, if you consider buildings that aren’t derelict and keeling over due to neglect ‘upstanding’. Regardless, it isn’t in the Narrows, which is a step up no matter which way you look at it. It’s not far from one of Gotham’s lower-end shopping districts, where there’s a mall and a baseball stadium and a park, and the orphanage nestled just outside of that. It’s a small, plain building. Square. Bars over the windows, even the ones on the third floor. Looks more like a prison than a temporary home for young children. The way the buildings around it are arranged make it so that there hasn’t been a single strand of sunlight to touch the building in years. The brick is hard and cold, cast in a perpetual shade it can do nothing about. It is dismal, to say the least.

The inside doesn’t fare much better. He steps into a short but narrow hallway. Dark. Lit only by the daylight that the square, frosted glass window over the door allows. The paint on the walls—navy blue—is peeling, and the off-white trim is bruised and battered and dirty, littered with fingerprints and skid marks.

He takes a moment to fix his clothes, make sure his hair is tucked into his baseball cap, wets his dry and chapped lips. They feel odd without the greasepaint. Bare. He doesn’t like it, but he knows this is a small price to pay to see her again.

Everything in his body is fueled by an electric current, his veins thrumming with an anticipation so palpable he can taste the copper tang of livewire on his tongue. He is both impatient and excited, and, maybe, even a touch _nervous_. Anxious. The only thing he knows about her is that she’s alive, she’s _alive,_ and he will see her for the first time in eleven years.

He goes to the tall counter at the end of the hall. It’s empty, but there is an office behind it. He walks closer to see over the countertop. The room behind it is crammed tight with filing cabinets, plastic bins spilling with papers, and an equally overflowing desk, the surface of which is not even visible. There is apparently so much paper that they’ve moved to utilizing the walls. There isn’t a single space of wall that isn’t occupied by a push-pin or Post-It note.

The Joker lets his eyes wander to the figure slumped behind the desk: an overweight woman with coarse, black hair—more grayish than black—passed out in a dead sleep, her mouth open as she snores.

He smacks his lips and leans against the counter, slicks back his hair and then clears his throat. Loudly.

The woman jolts awake, the rolls of fat gathered beneath her neck, like the jowls of a turkey, becoming even more prominent when she sits upright. She takes a minute to find her glasses—which are hanging around her neck—and puts them on before she looks up at him through a haze of sleep.

He waits for her vision to focus before addressing her. Time to butter her up.

“Hello, doll,” he drawls. He watches the way her eyebrows raise, two very, very thin lines, with an arch drawn so high the Joker thinks it will recede into her hairline. She huffs to get out of her chair so she can give him a closer look.

She awards him the same courtesy. Up close, her face is pale and moony, and there are dark circles, the color of day-old bruises, permanently tattooed on the bags under her eyes. The blue blouse stretched across her belly is about three sizes too small. The Joker stares at her breasts—or rather, the buttons that run vertically down her front—that look like they are barely holding on by a thread, and will threaten to pop open if she would just move or bend over the wrong way. He lifts his gaze to meet her dead-eyed stare.

“Can I help you?” she drones.

Hm. Not interested, then. This isn’t going to be as easy as he thought, but the Joker just so happens to be _good_ at getting people to do what he wants, especially if that includes overlooking a few questionable discrepancies in the background check she’s going to have to run for a person who doesn’t actually exist—miniscule discrepancies, really.

He lays it on thick—as he is wont to do—and butters her up _reaaal_ nice, bats his eyelashes, stares pointedly at her… feminine assets, if you catch his drift, says some things that are perhaps a touch suggestive, perhaps a touch not depending on where your mind is. And _her_ mind? Stuck about 2.5 miles back at home within the pages of _Fifty Shades of Gray_ lying on the nightstand next to the black, ribbed-for-her-pleasure dildo.

He’s not joking. He’s _seen_ it.

She relaxes, then—or perhaps that’s not _quite_ the word for the way her pits are sweating through her blouse, and her panties are as wet as a coastal city during a hurricane, and he can _smell_ the pheromones radiating off her.

She introduces herself as Deb, and yes, yes he already knows, can we get to the _point_ already?

Soon, though, as predicted, she melts into the palm of his hand. Give or take fifteen minutes and a hell of a lot of patience, and his little plan is sold and in the bag. She is so utterly delighted that a handsome man such as himself _deigns_ it upon himself to give her the time of day that she all but ignores basic protocol. He stares at her in a way that makes her face deep red—like the color of strawberry filling inside a jelly donut—and turns her eyes glassy with want.

“I—I’ll just go get her, Mr. Kerr,” she says, and the Joker nods, offers a salacious little smile, and makes a point of staring at her meaty bottom as she turns from him and does as she’s told. 

When the door clicks shut behind her, the Joker spins on his heels and paces, is all nerves and staccato energy once more, feels a shiver run through him in a way he hasn’t felt in a long while.

The tick of the plastic wall clock sounds magnified and slow, as if time itself has slowed to a crawl just to torment him for his impatience.

His mouth is dry. His palms sweat. His pulse races, blood crashing around in his body like it doesn’t know where it’s going. He thinks the reaction he is having is almost _comical_ , and he wants to laugh at the _absurdity_ of all it, he does, but before he can, he hears the door creak open and he stops, turns slowly, so slowly, to look, to see _her_ after all these years.

Taylor.

She looks at him and he looks at her and everything in the room falls away, like it’s just them, them in this empty, space-less void where nothing else exists, not even sound.

He tries to read her face, tries to gauge if that expression sprawled so openly across her features is one of recognition. But she just looks at him like… like she’s confused. Puzzled. Like maybe she has seen him before, but only in a far-off dream that was already half-forgotten by the time she’d woken up.

He watches the way she tilts her head and bites the flesh of her bottom lip, frowns a little, like she just can’t pinpoint where she’s seen him before. The look sends a thrill down his spine, her expression so reminiscent of the ones he knows he has often made himself, and he can’t help but wonder if it’s an expression she learned from him, if it’s something she unconsciously picked up from him and has been doing all these years they’ve been apart.

More still, he _delights_ in the way interest flashes in her eyes seconds later—green eyes, still so fucking _green_ —something akin to wonder and fascination flitting across her gaze as she eyes him up and down.

She blushes when she realizes what she’s done, when she realizes he hasn’t looked away or blinked since the moment she stepped into the room, and he loves it, feels such intense satisfaction spark through him from her reaction… but then Deb breaks the spell to interrupt, and the trance is momentarily broken. Taylor averts her gaze to the floor.

Deb takes the opportunity to move a little closer so she can squeeze a bicep and introduce him as Taylor’s “Uncle Joe”, and remarks on how _nice_ it is that he has come to visit. The Joker tries hard not to glare at her in a way that reveals how badly he wants to string her up by her thick ankles and cut out her insides so he can force-feed her her own entrails.

“Deb. _Debbie_ ,” he croons. “Maybe it’d be best if me and the little lady here had some _pri-va-cee_. Get to be uh, reacquainte _d_. Wouldn’t that be alright?”

She nods furiously. “Of course!” she says too quickly. “Yes, yes, right over here.” She leads them the short distance to the sitting room, a square, windowless space with a table and four chairs that looks more like an interrogation room than a room where parents can interact and get to know their potential future child in a quiet and private setting.

Deb urges Taylor to sit down and then fusses over Uncle Joe. Can I take your jacket? Would you like some coffee? Water? Tea?

He declines all offers without once taking his eyes off Taylor, not even when the door shuts and it is finally silent, finally the two of them after all these years.

He knows he is staring at her like he wants to devour her. It makes her cheeks flush in the same way she did when she was little, but it’s different now because she’s grown up, and she knows grownup things and that people can be more ill-intentioned than all those years of childhood innocence would lead you to believe.

But she didn’t exactly have those years of luxury, did she? Because he plucked that from her without consent, without asking if that was what she wanted. He’s not ashamed of it because he doesn’t feel shame, and he doesn’t regret it because he likes what he’s done to her, liked it when he did it and knows he wouldn’t have done things differently.

He licks his lips and forgets they’re not slathered in greasepaint. Misses the taste. He slides his tongue along the inside of his cheek instead, tastes the rippled scar tissue there and finds his voice.

“You have _grown_ ,” he tells her, without any sort of special lilt to his voice. It’s not a question, not a taunt, just the honest truth, perhaps the most honest thing he’s said in a while.

He waits for a response, _hungers_ for the sound of her voice, needs to hear her say something, anything, but she doesn’t reply at all, just looks at him with wide-eyed wonder and a sliver of fear. She’s _scared_ of him.

That makes him angry.

She didn’t used to be scared. Not like this. What he wants now is for her to open up to him like a flower, the way she once had eleven years ago when she was too young and too naïve to know any better, to know that opening up to him was _dangerous_.

In the silence that follows, he studies her. He doesn’t try to make it look like he isn’t, he just does. Stares at her hair—still blonde, a slightly darker shade of it—which is straight now instead of curly. Stares at her eyes, mouth, the shape of her neck and shoulders and everything below that that is visible before the table cuts off his view. Stares at this teenage version of the little girl who had once clung to him in a way that no one ever had. Time hasn’t changed her much, except where it has changed her most of all.

Her eyes are dark, now, no longer full of hope and clung-to promises, or the special kind of innocence that only children can possess. Her eyes now tell the story of someone who has seen too many of the horrible things that the world has to offer, that Gotham has to offer. There is no faith there, no hope that one day the world will right itself and that good will triumph evil. There is simply the pain in knowing that the world is busted and broken, and that even if one day the world _is_ righted, it will not undo or compensate for all the wrongdoings, for the rapes and racism and murders and conglomerate of sins of a people drunk on power.

The seconds continue to tick by. Why won’t she _say_ something?

He finds himself getting impatient. He licks his lips and shifts in his chair. “You don’t know who I am, do you? You don’t… _remember_ me.”

She looks at him like he’s just spoken a foreign language, but he knows she understands because she shakes her head, just the slightest bit, to indicate that no, she doesn’t remember him. She doesn’t know who ‘Uncle Joe’ is or that she even had an uncle in the first place.

As the silence lingers, the Joker feels his patience waning. He is, for perhaps the first time, unsettled by the way she is staring at his scars. It’s not the _way_ she is staring that he doesn’t like, but the fact that it’s _her_ staring. She had once, in her childish curiosity and delight, told him that his scars looked like caterpillars. Now she is looking at him like he’s going to gut her.

Maybe he will.

“You see something you _like_?” He doesn’t know why he’s this angry all the sudden, why this little teenage girl who hasn’t even _said_ anything is able to pull these kind of emotions out of him, is able to make his blood boil like this, but he can’t stop himself, can’t grab ahold of this way she is making him feel.

“Answer me,” he growls, knowing he has to keep his voice low so _Deb_ doesn’t get suspicious. “These interest you?” he asks, gesturing to his scars. This time he doesn’t wait for a response. He snarls and lunges for her. “ _Maybe you’d like a closer look.”_

He stands before she can even register what he is doing, his chair scraping across the floor as his arm reaches for her and closes around her throat, hauling her out of her chair and halfway across the table so the tips of her shoes barely touch the floor.

He is breathing so hard he can barely see straight. Her neck is so soft and pliant beneath his hand, and he feels the muscles of her trachea contracting as it struggles for air. He doesn’t cut off all her air, just enough to make her eyes widen in fear, but she doesn’t fight him.

She doesn’t fight him.

This close, he can see the freckles dotted along the bridge of her nose and cheeks, can see his own reflection in the dark irises of her eyes, and the faint, purpled leftovers from an old bruise on her temple. A bruise from what or _whom_ he doesn’t know. 

He stares at her, and she stares at him, and he thinks for a moment he is going to crush her and how fucking _easy_ it would be, how good it would feel to hear her choked gasps for air and the crunch of her vertebrae—but all that bloodlust fades almost as instantly as it had come. Taylor reaches out a hand, slowly, almost tenderly, and touches the scar on his left cheek.

She is _crying_.

He freezes at the foreign touch, at the way he can feel every groove and ridge on the pads of her fingers against the furled and rippled flesh of his scar. His grip loosens until his hand drops entirely, and when their eyes meet, he sees _recognition_ flash in her eyes.

She stares at him in awe, unblinking, and then she sobs aloud and collapses into him, wraps her arms around his neck in an embrace, her knees planted on the table, and he doesn’t do anything but stand there as she sobs into his neck and grips him with bruising force.

“It’s you,” she says, and her voice cracks, and it’s the first time he’s heard her voice in eleven years. She sounds so little and afraid. “You came back for me.”

He feels something like a smile biting at his mouth, something like _relief_ wash over him. “Leave you here all by yourself? Why, I would _never_.”

She sniffles and he can feel her tears on his neck. “I… I remember when you told me that,” she says, as if she is awed that she does remember.  

She pulls away from him, and when she does her cheeks are ruddy and her eyelashes are soaked from crying, and she’s embarrassed to be kneeling on the table, so she quickly gets down, he steps back, and she dusts invisible dirt off her jeans which are three sizes too big.  

It’s quiet for a moment, the two of them standing there, the Joker still trying to process that she remembers him, remembers him after _eleven years_. He feels… cautious. Like maybe this could be a bad thing, or maybe he could twist it in his favor, or maybe he doesn’t have to.

“How much do you remember?” he hears himself asking, quietly, like there’s a sudden spell cast over the room and he doesn’t want to break it, doesn’t want this moment to spontaneously combust and to wake up and realize this was all some strange, psychotic dream.

“They tried to make me forget. The therapy, I—it didn’t work. But seeing you… I remember everything.” She looks up at him. “Oh, _God_ , I remember everything.” She puts a hand to her forehead as if she suddenly has a headache, and a look of panic crosses her features. She looks so much like a child when she stumbles towards the nearest chair and sinks into it, pulls her knees to her chest and bows her head so it rests atop them. “All of it,” she breathes.

The Joker’s mind races. He wonders if this is the moment where she’ll realize that she hates him for what he’s done, for all the things he made her see and all the things he made her _do_.

Her voice cuts through the silence with all of the intensity of a sharpened sword. She looks at him. She has to know. “Are you going to kill me? Is that—is that why you came?” The thought of it breaks her. “I—I waited for you, after all this time and you….” she trails off, unable to finish, and the Joker’s face hurts from how hard he is grinning.

This… this is not what he had expected. Before—before all of this—he hadn’t wanted her to remember, hadn’t wanted her to see him as the monster that he is. But now… now that’s exactly what he _wants_. He wants all of those memories to come flooding back to her, for her to remember every last disgusting, gritty detail of their story. He’ll make her remember that he saved her life while simultaneously destroying it. She’ll remember and he’ll make her feel _glad_ that it happened.   

The Joker hears himself laugh after a long beat of silence has passed. He _laughs_ , and Taylor buries her head as if her fate’s been sealed. He is grinning when he kneels in front of her, pulls down her legs so she can’t shield herself from him, and forces her to look at him.

“ _Kill_ you? After everything we’ve been through? No. No, no, no, no, _no_ ,” he says quickly. He shifts too close, so energized now. He sees only her and the map work of her brain laid out before him and the way he is going to _twist_ and _tangle_ all the roads and pathways so she doesn’t even know which way is up and which is down. “That’d be too easy. Too _boring_. Because you know what’s much more interesting to me than all that?” He shifts so he’s closer, grips the legs of the chair. He realizes he’s got her right where he wants her, where she’s open and vulnerable and his for the taking. “I think you’re mad at me that I didn’t come back for you sooner, and I think you pined for me like the _sweeee-t_ lonely little girl you are,” here his voice drops, “and I think despite all that you still _love_ me, and I wanna hear you _say it_.”

She looks away as if he’s read something from her diary, and if she looks away fast enough, maybe he won’t be able to decipher if his words are true. The room feels weighted and buried in a heavy silence. He already knows what she’s going to ask next.

“Why didn’t you come back for me sooner?” she asks, and her voice cracks from the weight of her words. “I… I _waited_. I didn’t know it was you I was waiting for. But I did wait.” The tears lodged in her throat makes her voice crack. “I waited for so long.” 

“And that makes you mad, doesn’t it?”

She can’t look at him. “Yes,” she whispers.

“But you still love me after all this time, don’t you? You still wished I would come, thought about me eveeery night that you laid awake in your little bed, wishing on all those _stars_ you saw outside your window that I would come for you.” When she doesn’t reply he grips her chin in a vice and forces her eyes to his. “ _Didn’t you_?”

“Yes,” she sobs.

The Joker scowls and releases her chin as if he is physically repulsed by her. “You are disgusting,” he sneers. “Weak. Do you think anyone could possibly _want_ someone so pathe- _tic_?” He leans back on his haunches, lets go of the legs of the chair. “You, so desperately clinging to idea that I would come and _save_ you, that I would _rescue_ you so you can have the fairytale ending you’ve been wanting and we’ll all live haaappily ever after.” He _tsks_. “You are in love with a _monster_. Think about all those things that I’ve done, _that I made you do_. Doesn’t that _shame_ you? Doesn’t that make you just _hate yourself_ for the way that you feel?”

Taylor shook her head, fresh tears spilling down her cheeks. “Stop this. What are you doing?”

“Telling you the _truth_. You’re old enough now to know the relationship between cause and effect, and that every action has _consequences_.” He leans in close, then, changing his approach, letting everything he just said weigh down upon her so that it sinks into every pore, worms its way inside her like a parasite and eats away at every part of her that doubts his words. He’s planted the seed, now it’s time to watch it grow.

He reaches out and tucks a long strand of hair behind her ear. “You’re so _fragile_ ,” he whispers. “A liii-ttle broken _doll_. No one else can change that, not even _you_.” He raises his brows, almost as if daring her to challenge his words. She won’t, though, not when he can see her hanging off of his every word even though she’d like him to think that she isn’t. “Out there,” he gestures behind him, to the dirty streets of Gotham just behind that wall, “the world will eat you alive. It will _crush_ you until you are nothing but ashes and dus _t_. Gotham… it has a way of finding your _weak_ spots and _digging_ and _burrowing_ into those holes with a five-inch bla _de_ until you’ve _bled out_ and nothing of you is left.” He grips the seat of her chair on either side of her. “Out there, no one can protect you, and no one will _want_ to because of the things you’ve done, because you are a dirty, pathetic piece of _shit_.” Taylor winces at the insult, at the intensity at which it is delivered. “But I can,” the Joker says, watches as he tears away that last shred of  her innocence, tears it right in fucking half. “I’m the only one who can save you now.”

He studies her intently. Doesn’t say anything as he watches all her emotions flash freely across her face, reading her just like he used to when she was a child.

She is too stunned to say anything, and when he stands, when he leaves to let her mind simmer with all the seeds he’s planted in there, she cries out for him, just when his hand is on door, ready to turn the knob.

“ _Wait_! You can’t leave me,” she pleads, sounding so desperate and afraid, so much like the little girl who had been taken from him and forced into the back of a police car against her will as she screamed for him. She jumps out of her chair and stands to face him, curls her arms around her middle like a lifeline, like it’s the only thing keeping her upright. “I know that I need you. You can’t leave me here again. _Please_.”  

The Joker faces the door and grins. He doesn’t turn around.

“Oh, sugar, don’t you worry. I’m gonna come _back_.”

He did, after all, say that everything would go just. Like. _Clockwork_.


	2. Chapter 2

_Who has not asked himself at some time or other: am I a monster or is this what it means to be a person?_

_—Clarice Lispector_

**Part ll**

The power had gone out again.

The digital clock reads 2:27, and the glowing numbers flash in intervals from across the dark expanse of the room, like the way traffic lights flash red late at night at four-way stops. There is no trace of moonlight through the curtains, no telling what time it really is.

Taylor rolls over onto her side and fishes for her wristwatch on the nightstand. Can’t read it in the dark. She heaves a quiet sigh, careful not to wake the occupant sleeping on the other side of the room. She kicks off the covers, stands. Her nightgown falls to her thighs, and she feels the hairs on her arms and legs stand at attention at the sudden, sharp bite of the cold.

The hardwood floor is a cinderblock of ice under her bare feet. She pads silently to the door, opens it. The hallway greets her, empty and black, like a starless night. She feels her way towards the bathroom, trailing her hand along the wall as a point of contact. Even the wall carries a chill, like it too wishes to be enveloped in a blanket of warmth, protected from the winter elements.

She steps inside the bathroom and blindly reaches for the light switch; the nightlight had burnt out three weeks ago, and no one had thought to replace it. She fingers the wall in the dark, trying to find the switch, when she suddenly becomes aware of a presence looming behind her. She gasps as the body behind her crowds her into the bathroom, closing the door. She thinks for a moment that it’s Meredith, that she had been too loud getting out of bed. She stumbles forward, and there’s the flick of the light switch, and then the overhead above the mirror shining like a spotlight—harsh and accosting. She squints against it, can’t see for a long moment.

“The fuck are you doing?”

Now the hairs on her arms stand on end for a different reason.

“Nathan, I—”

The door closes. He shoves her aside. She has to catch herself on the towel rack to keep from falling.

“Watch out. I gotta piss.”

She’s too stunned to move, watches him without really meaning to. He plants his bare feet on the scruffy peach rug that rims the toilet. The clang of porcelain as he flips up the seat and it hits the back of the toilet. Watches him pull down his mesh athletic shorts. His pale cock.

She finally turns away, goes to open the bathroom door.

“Stay,” he commands, without even looking at her. “Turn around.”

And that’s the power he has over her. He doesn’t even have to look at her, doesn’t have to pin her where she stands with one narrow-eyed, meaningful glare. He just speaks, and she obeys. She knows better than to challenge him. Not after last time.

She turns around, but doesn’t look at him— _can’t_ look at him, focusing instead on her reflection in the bottom, right-hand corner of the mirror, where her hand is clenched in a tight fist around her watch. She had only wanted to use the bathroom light to check the time.

She listens to the hard stream of his piss hit the toilet. Hears the last few droplets inside the bowl as the stream tapers off. The sound of his relieved sigh. She grimaces when he flushes. It’s so loud, she hopes it doesn’t wake anyone up.

She doesn’t look when he comes towards her, his shorts still around his thighs. “Clean it.”

She backs herself into the corner. He follows. She can’t help but think how out of place he looks, so tall and butch against the sea-foam walls, the soap dish shaped like a cockle seashell, the coral-colored towels, the open drawer beneath the sink full of feminine pads wrapped in daisy-patterned plastic. Taylor stares up at his bare chest, the few stray brown hairs there, the same color as the wiry hair around his cock. The sign of manhood.

“No,” she whispers. She can barely hear her own voice above the thudding of her heart. “Please don’t make me.”

He reaches for her hand but she quickly tucks both arms behind her back, hiding them from him. He grimaces but isn’t deterred. She watches as he reaches for her nightgown with one hand and then grabs his cock with the other, wiping the cotton fabric back and forth across his cockhead. She can feel his eyes on her face the whole time. She’s so hot with shame she wonders if he can feel it too, the way it radiates off her as if she were a furnace, or an oven with the door left open.

Dry now, he tucks himself back into his shorts. Taylor can’t bear to meet his eyes, stares at the floor and wishes it would swallow her whole, wishes that sand would materialize in this makeshift bathroom beach, just for an instant, just long enough for her to escape from this moment and never return.  

“You really are a piece of shit.” He laughs without mirth, the kind of laugh that makes her insides shrivel up, makes her feel small. Worthless. Then the flat of his palm meets her forehead with a force that sends the back of her head knocking against the wall behind her. _Bang_. Galaxies flash before her eyes, like the kind you see when you rub your eyes with your balled up fists, and sparkly blue stars appear against a Vantablack backdrop.

The disgust in his voice alone would have been enough to knock her down, but when coupled with his own unique brand of vulgarity, it sends shame of the likes she’s never felt before rippling through her insides, knocking down pillars of confidence, self-worth—slabs of stone she had constructed with painstaking effort and time. Devastating, how years’ worth of careful cultivation could be obliterated in only a matter of seconds, as if those pillars had been erected using paper instead of stone.

She crawls back into bed, under her covers, stinking of Nathan’s piss. She has nothing else to wear, and it is her only set of pajamas. Evelyn will kill her if she arrives at the breakfast table in the morning with her school clothes wrinkled.  

She settles into bed and pulls her quilt up to her chin, tries to breathe in the fibers of her bedspread, tries not to think about what just happened, how violated she feels. Tries not to think about what he’d said to her.

What she tries most not to think about, though, is how different those same words had sounded coming out of Mr. J’s mouth, how they’d had an entirely different effect on her.

_You are a dirty, pathetic piece of shit._

Goose bumps prickle across her skin; she touches her arm and feels them erupt beneath the pads of her fingers, something almost electric about them, like someone, somewhere, has jumpstarted a livewire current beneath her skin. She can still hear his voice, remembers exactly how he’d sounded when he’d told her those words, the _way_ he’d said them, the disgust, the finality, like that was all she would ever be. Remembers the way she had recoiled at first, how she had cried, feeling betrayed by his cruelty. She’d been angry at him for being so callous, so brutally honest, for leaving her with that gut-punched, hollow feeling in her stomach, like being pushed to the ground at recess and having the wind knocked out of her.

And then after, the numinous realization that maybe he was right, that maybe she _was_ disgusting, fragile, broken. The pungent, heady truth of his words, how much they’d terrified and settled her all at once. Like drowning for years, only to have him come back and cast a line to her, draw her in to some distant shore and breathe new life into her, new meaning.

It’s the easiest truth she’s ever swallowed, like downing a cup from the Lethe. That’s how she knows he’s right, the ease at which his words had slid down her throat, the way they’d tasted on her palate, how they’d settled somewhere deep inside her, in a place no one had ever reached, in a place she herself had never touched or seen, like discovering a new path in the woods you’d somehow overlooked, or some secret cupboard in the house that no one had ever told you about.

He’d told her that the world would chew her up and spit her back out again, told her that she deserved that. That no one could ever want someone like her, could ever protect her. No one could save her from herself. 

Only he could.

Her new meaning is that she has no meaning. She understands that now. She is nothing outside of his plane of existence, nothing outside of this planetary orbit she inhibits, at which he is the center, and she the revolving force.  

Who was she without the gray pallor of his shadow cast over her? And who was she without his eyes on her, drinking her in in that way that only he could. Who was she without his careful hands, shaping her, grounding her, molding her to him in this way she was preordained to be.

She needs him. She is nothing without him. Only he can save her.

A small part of her hopes that he needs her too. She clings to that hope, clings to it because it’s all she has to hold onto.

He had promised he would come back. He had _promised_.

It was all she could do not to spontaneously combust, to burst with hapless energy at every seam, dart in the middle of a busy street just so the anxiety of waiting for him to return would come to an abrupt end. He plagues her constantly, his sillage, the veil of his essence that he’s left behind for her, like some terrible parting gift. It clouds her every thought, impedes her vision at every turn. She cannot even navigate to its edges to pull it back, to lift it, like being trapped in a burning house where the smoke’s so thick and black you can’t even see your own hands.

She realizes there is not a moment that exists where she is not thinking about him, even if he is tucked somewhere in the back of her mind; and if he is there, in the corner reaches, he doesn’t stay there for long, eventually sidling his way to the forefront, where he does not allow her to rest, where he demands her attention, every last thread of it. It all belongs to him. He might as well have her on a leash. She goes where he pulls, and that is all.

She knows this is dangerous, this want that she has, this aching, pulsing need that she continues to feed, that she births new life to day after day. Every day brings a new fantasy, something selcouth and intangible, the kind that grips her hard by the heart, squeezes with an intensity that leaves her breathless, keeled over in bed in pain. She feels as though her body has betrayed her. She wants, wants, _wants,_ with the sort of physicality she is not used to, that she doesn’t understand, can’t make sense of.

She has never felt this way before, can’t even put a name to what she’s feeling. She wonders if this is how Nathan feels when he comes into her room at night when Meredith is sleeping at a friend’s house, when he pushes her down on her bed onto her stomach and humps her like a dog, comes all over her underwear. Is that what she’s feeling? Is it that same uncontrollable urge to just take, touch, have?  

She ignores the thrill of wondering whether Mr. J has ever felt that way about her, if this same need is something he’s wrought with. If he’s in just as much pain as she is. 

Somehow her body craves his presence as much as her mind does. And that’s an ache she cannot give much thought to—she forbids herself from it, is confused by it. She thinks a lot about the way his hands had felt around her neck, the way her pulse slowed beneath his grip, the way his scars had felt beneath the pad of her fingertips… wonders why she wants that so badly, wonders why being so close to him sets her on fire, why the thought of redamancy existing between them is something she craves so desperately. 

She replays these fantasies of him and her over and over again with a palinoia that borders on insanity. But she can’t stop. It’s the only fuel she has. Now that she’s had a taste of this, now that she knows he’s out there, she can’t just go back to the life she’s been living, a thought so horrible it has her running to the nearest toilet during fourth period to unload all the contents of her stomach from that day. Simply put: the idea of returning to her same old routine is a fear she can no longer stomach. She lives only for the future, for the moment that Mr. J will return for her.

The worst part—aside from the agony of waiting, of hoping—is knowing that everyone can see it.

Teachers tell her she’s distant. Evelyn—her foster mother, one of eight, so far—is one strike away from sending her back to the orphanage. She says it’s because Taylor is “not in invested in the family” and “depressed”. “Ungrateful” is another complaint that is thrown around with newfound regularity. That one is her favorite insult to hurl; that Taylor is ungrateful, doesn’t appreciate Evelyn opening up her home to her, providing her with a warm place to stay, food on the table.

But she was never welcome here. She knew that from the beginning. Meredith had resented her from the start—and why shouldn’t she? Being forced to share her room with a total stranger, her clothes, her toys, her books. Taylor remembers the first night, Meredith carefully constructing a duct-tape line across the floor, clearing demarking her side of the room from Taylor’s. Afterwards she stood with her hand on her bedpost, looking like Buzz Aldrin clutching the flag on the moon just after he’s staked his claim. _I was here first._  

“Touch something on my side of the room, and you die.”

Nathan was different. He had at least pretended to like her, had made an effort to get close to her. But it didn’t take long for her to grow wary of him, of the way he asserted himself around her. Sitting too close, the not-so-tender way he laid a heavy hand on her thigh beneath the dinner table, finding reasons to barge into the bathroom when he knew it was occupied, smiling at her in a way she knew was more predatory than friendly. It only took two weeks for his patience to snap completely.

That first time, after school, just the two of them at home, Evelyn at work, Meredith at softball practice. The way he’d come into her room, the heat in his gaze, the resounding click of the lock as the door closed. She’d gotten up immediately—to run, to fight him off, she didn’t know. But all she could do was cry. Cry when he forced her to her knees, cry when he pulled down his shorts, tugged at his cock until he’d come all over her face. And when he forced himself into her mouth, she bit down, hard.  

And then she cried again, when he beat her black and blue. She could barely walk. At the dinner table, with a black eye, bruised ribs, and a busted, fat lip, she explained she’d gotten in a fight at school. Evelyn sent her upstairs without anything to eat as punishment.

It’s been two months since then, and four since Mr. J had come to her at the orphanage, had revealed himself to her, four months since the floodgates in her mind were opened and out poured a tumultuous wave of memories she thought she had lost.

Every day that is marked by another absence is even harder to swallow than the last. Time becomes a weighted, physical burden that she can no longer shoulder. She tries to make sense of this, why he hasn’t come yet, what is taking so long, but she comes up empty-handed every time. She needs him, and he has not come.

It’s almost New Years. Taylor is thankful for the end of Christmas break, cannot take another day at Evelyn’s, another day of hiding in her room, of trying to occupy as little space as possible curled up in her bed, trying not to incur Meredith’s anger. Another day of trying to keep her distance from Nathan.

It works, for a while. She feigns sick by pressing her face against the heating vent on the floor in the corner of the room, and then diving back under the covers when she hers footsteps approaching. Evelyn checks her temperature with the back of her hand and declares she has a fever. And Taylor lies in bed for three days and milks it for all she’s worth.

Christmas passes, and she returns to school. It’s a welcome distraction, at least for a while. Her thoughts drift in class, and at lunch she sits alone and hears the other girls whispering about her shoddy clothes while they sit at their respective tables dressed in their new Christmas gifts—beautiful woven sweaters with matching sparkly headbands, fleece-lined boots that lace up to the knee, big puffy coats to block out the coming brumal chill of January.  

She pokes at her dry slab of ham and slops her mashed potatoes around her plate with her fork, stale leftovers from the meal that was served one and a half weeks ago before school let out for Christmas.

When the final bell rings for the day, Taylor gathers her books from her locker and clambers onto the bus with the other students who live in South Side. She takes her usual seat near the back and rests her head against the window. Feels the cold glass against her scalp, watches her warm breath fog up the glass, blurring everything from view. It doesn’t take long for the bus to fill, and it lurches forward in a way that jostles her in her seat, making her sit up straight.

She watches one dilapidated house pass after the other. Houses marred by drooping powerlines, struggling beneath the weight of last night’s snowfall. Gray houses with chipped, concrete steps and missing porch railings, houses with tarps over leaky rooves, boards over broken windows, houses with junk in the yard that cannot be salvaged, with broken down cars permanently parked in loose gravel driveways, covered in black tarps like oversized body bags. Houses with dead, skeletal bushes that bare all of their gnarled bones, empty flower pots that have turned into cigarette butt receptacles, wicker furniture with missing limbs, as if blown away in some long-forgotten war.

The bus stops in a busier housing development, one where the majority of kids get out and the bus is noticeably quieter in their absence. Taylor watches them cross in front of the bus to the other side of the street to disband their separate ways. And that’s when she sees him.

Mr. J, sitting on a bench beneath the plastic bus shelter. Looking straight at her.

Her heart stops point blank, and for a second she can’t even breathe. The bus lurches forward suddenly, and Taylor has to catch herself on the seat in front of her. When she cranes her head back to look at the bus stop, he’s gone.

Gone, just like that.

Her heart feels as though it’s caught in the vices of a clenched fist. Fear grips her, somewhere low in her belly, where she can’t pull it out; part of her is ready to jump out of her seat and rush to the front of the bus, demand that the driver stop so she can get off. But another part of her wonders if he had just been a mirage, a figment of an overactive imagination, one that is clinging too hard to hope, to what she wants to see. How is it possible that he could be there one second and then gone the next? As the bus pulls further away, her eyes dart back and forth, scanning all nearby surroundings, but there’s no sign of him.   

She settles back into her seat, wills her heart to calm, even as goose bumps prickle over her arms like the bite of sharp thorns. He had looked so _real_. Had it all been a fever-dream? Was she really so desperate for him that her mind would resort to conjuring him sitting alone at a bus stop?

At home, she cries in bed beneath the safety of her covers, hating how pathetic she was, hating _him_ for taking so long to fulfill his promise, to come back for her.

The next day, after school has let out and she has raced to the bus to effectively be the first one on, she sits in her usual seat with her eyes glued to the window and her heart caught somewhere in the spiral columns of her throat, blocking her airway.  

The minutes crawl by with an agonizing stagnancy of which there is no comparison. She tongues at her bottom lip with harried impatience and bounces her knee and digs her fingers into her thighs and knows she must look crazy.  

As the bus slows and the familiar stop approaches, she scoots to the edge of her seat and impatiently scans the area, feeling like every muscle in her body has gone rigid in anticipation, every moving part inside of her is lying still in wait.  

The disappointment takes only seconds to crash over her, one big tidal wave of it to drown her whole. She should have known better than to get her hopes up.  

Taylor has to squeeze her eyes shut to keep the tears from spilling. Anger is hot and heavy in her chest, so startling in its intensity that it practically burns—but despair is quick to follow, and it coats everything in its wake, like a thick blanket of ash. She feels nothing but numbness.

Meredith is sleeping at a friend’s house. It’s three o’clock in the morning. Taylor hears the floorboards creak underneath Nathan’s feet as he slopes back to his room. She lies in bed staring at the ceiling with dried tear tracks on her cheeks and realizes she must face the heinous truth: Mr. J lied to her.

She cries for him. She cries for him in the way you cry for a lover who doesn’t love you back, or for someone you love whose scope of understanding is so far removed from love, that you know they could never feel the same way about you as you feel for them. She cries for how tightly she’d clung to meliorism, this idea that he’d come for her and suddenly all of her troubles would disintegrate. She thought she’d belong somewhere, she’d have purpose. She’d be rescued. _Saved_.

There is a lesson to be learned in all of this, and it is that hope is a dangerous thing to cling to, perhaps the most dangerous thing in the world if clung to too tightly. She’s staked her entire future—her world—around an idea, a hope, only to have it come crashing down around her.

What else left for her is there? She cannot make it without him—he’d made that much clear. Her only hope is nepenthe, or perhaps to enter some fugue state where the past ceases to exist, where she forgets everything, even her own name. Only then can she be free of this.

It’s New Year’s Eve. The snow has all melted, leaving in its wake dirty, gray-slush streets. Meredith is having friends over from school to spend the night—a fact she makes abundantly clear when she tells Taylor that if she dares come downstairs during her slumber party, Meredith will be having a lot more sleepovers at other friends’ houses in the future. The threat makes Taylor pause in a way that she never has before, a frisson of fear rippling through her insides, gripping her with a tenacity she’d felt only once before.

Meredith _knows._

This whole time she’d known what Nathan had been doing to her, what he would continue to do, and still she made the conscious decision to leave Taylor to her own devices, to make it a habitual occurrence, even, so that Nathan could find release three nights a week instead of one.

This newfound knowledge makes something inside Taylor splinter. Meredith strides away without another word, and Taylor withdraws upstairs and hugs her knees to her chest on the bathroom floor, fighting back angry tears, and the convulsions of her own fluttery lungs.

Sometime later, as navy ribbons of darkening sky begin to shift through the frosted glass window above the shower, the laughter of the girls in the living room also wafts up the stairwell. She imagines them sitting in a huddled circle on the floor in front of the TV, sharing whispery gossip as they paint each other nails, or braid each other’s hair. Maybe Meredith tells them that her stupid foster sister gives Nathan blowjobs every night, and Taylor likes it, or that Taylor lets Nathan hump her like a dog whenever he feels like it, and she does nothing to stop him.

The bile that crawls up her throat comes fast and hard, and she lunges for the toilet, desperately flipping open the lid, unloading the contents of her afternoon lunch. Afterwards, she sinks against the toilet rug and sobs, open-mouthed, over the rim.

At the sink, she rinses the acrid taste from her mouth and turns off the faucet, wiping the snot from her nose with the back of her hand. Then she goes to her room, to her side of the closet, and puts on her jacket. It’s thin, but it’s the only one she has. She zips it to her chin with the sort of decisiveness of someone who knows they are about to do something they shouldn’t, but will not be held back.

There is a tree outside the window whose branches often scratch against the pane on windy nights. She pulls open the window and climbs on those branches now until she has reached the ground, trembling the whole way.

Thoughts of Meredith and her friends are quickly forgotten. Now all she thinks about is Mr. J, his lies. His abandonment. Were they doomed to be Antiscians forever? Was that their fate? Had he made her a promise only to take such cruel pleasure in breaking it? She thought before there was something synodic about the two of them, something astral about their projection, their intended destination, like two nebulae hurling towards each other in a fiery, preordained collision. She had been so sure of it, but now she wonders if she had only been clinging to a phantom sensation, an apparitional hope, a paracosm of her own faulty design.

She hates herself so fiercely for it.

She doesn’t know where she is going. She doesn’t know what she will do. She takes to the sidewalk with long strides, like she’s in some particular hurry to get somewhere, when really all she wants is to just be anywhere but here. There’s a park nearby, with broken swings and a yellow slide and rusted monkey bars, and she thinks about going there, to sit on the rickety swings to clear her mind, to think, but the night is frigid, and she is too cold to be solitary and sit in one place, so she keeps moving.

While the sky is devoid of stars, the moon hangs like a fishing hook low in the sky, partially obstructed by the tail ends of wispy nighttime clouds.

She walks for a long time, past South Side suburbia and into the hub and hum of the city, where the streets are busy, crawling with nightlife. The restaurants are packed. It’s two hours till midnight, but still people stand outside bars, holding glass bottles in one hand and drunkenly waving sparklers in the other. The air is heavy with the residual smoke from cigarettes and faraway fireworks. The raucous laughter and excited chatter of an entire city waiting for midnight seems to follow her for a long time as she makes her way towards a quieter, industrial part of town. Out here, no one will find her.

There’s an electrical plant on one side of the wide channel and an abandoned shipping warehouse on the other, and on both sides a long, tangled maze of train tracks that are no longer in use. Connecting the two land masses is a metal bridge with railroad tracks laid down its middle, the years of disuse evident in the rusted metal, the rotting wood, and the graffiti.

She finds that the city is quiet here. She carefully steps onto one of the wooden planks of the bridge, then makes her way towards the center. Here she stops, looks down. The water beneath her is quiet, still. Black. She wonders at its contents, what lurks beneath the inky surface. Wonders if the icy slap of water would kill her instantly, or if she’d feel it, her bones shattering, her skull splitting in two, her tendons snapping like bungee cords placed under too much strain. And if the fall doesn’t kill her, then the temperature surely will. It wouldn’t take long, she thinks.

She sees the lights of the nearby electrical plant, flickering across the water through the break in the trees that line the channel. It gives the water an almost milky, soft appearance.

Taylor grips the rails of the bridge before she really knows what she’s doing, climbs over to the other side, where there’s just barely enough room to stand on the jutting planks. The metal at her back is cold, as if it’s pressed up against bare skin and not two layers of clothing. Her knuckles are as white as the moon where she grips the railing behind her, and she lets out a slow exhale, watches her breath fog in front of her and then drift away.

Then she’s leaning forward, her arms fully extended as she grips the railing behind her, her upper body outstretched, hanging over the dark expanse of water that shifts below her. If she listens closely, she can hear the waves softly lapping at the support beams that hold up the bridge. She closes her eyes, feels her legs trembling, feels the icy wind sift through the loose tendrils of her hair. Her fingers are cramping from how tightly she grips the metal bar.

She could do it. She could let go. This could all be over in an instant. This one thing she actually has control over: whether she takes her life, or keeps it.

There’s something wet on her cheek, and she’s not sure if it’s a spray of water from below or her own tears. The bridge creaks and sighs as the wind moves through it. She focuses on that, lets the wind whisper to her what it will. She can almost hear it coaxing her forward.

Let go. _Let go_.

So she does. She lets go.

And when she does, all she has is this sudden realization that nearly splits in her half, that she’s done it, _this is it_ , this is the freefall—but it lasts for only a second before it is cruelly yanked away.

A hand grips her upper arm right as she has begun her fall forward into oblivion. It yanks her back, hard, against the railing, so hard she sees stars, and then there is arm around her waist, and she cries out as she is roughly tugged back over the railing, onto the other side of the bridge.

She doesn’t know if she’s furious or relieved. She screams out into the darkness nevertheless, fighting off the hands that grip her as she tries to right herself. She spins around, chest heaving, struggling for the air she thought would get sucked out of her upon the impact that had not happened.

And it’s him. _Him_. The reason for this, for all of it. He is there in all of his glory—not how he was at the orphanage, but the way she remembers him as a child. The purple suit, the greasepaint, the putrid shade of green clinging to the tangled strands of his hair. The image of him leaves her breathless, and she feels as though she’s caught inside a moment that’s been frozen in time.

When he takes a step towards her, she instinctively stumbles back. She can sense the fury tearing through him, can practically taste his cataclysmic rage. She realizes—in this moment— she is completely terrified of him.

“What do you think you’re _doing_?” he growls. The intensity in his gaze alone is enough to plow through her, knock her to the ground—but it’s his voice that levels her, raw and gutted, and the touch of breathless anger, like he thought, for just a moment, that he wouldn’t be able to stop her. Like he was about to lose her forever.

“I—I thought you weren’t going to come back,” she whispers. She is shaking all over, so badly there’s no use in hiding it. She doesn’t know if she trembles from the cold, what she had almost done, or from the shock of finally seeing him here in front of her. All she knows is that it’s hard to catch her breath, and she’s so lightheaded she threatens to succumb to unconsciousness. She swallows instead, tries desperately to calm her fluttering lungs, her wild pulse.

 _This is real_ , she tells herself. He isn’t a mirage this time. He’s here in front of her. He came back.

“I never left,” he snarled, the agitation in his voice clear and unmistakable, making her wince at its impact. “I’ve been here the whole time.”

It takes a moment for her to understand the significance of his statement, but the way he is looking at her leaves no room for misinterpretation. He doesn’t just mean here, on the bridge, but everything. From the second he left her at the orphanage to this very moment they’re sharing now. He was always there, wasn’t he? Watching.

She shudders at this revelation. “How much?” she wants to know, hating how her voice cracks. “How much did you see?”

“All of it.”

It dawns on her suddenly that she _hadn’t_ imagined him at the bus stop. He really had been there. She thought she had been going crazy, and yet this whole time he had been… he had been taunting her. Testing her, perhaps. But then another realization strikes her, and she looks up sharply to meet his gaze.

“But—but you knew that—Nathan?” She knows she’s not making any sense, that her speech is disjointed, incoherent. “You could’ve… you didn’t stop him,” she says.  

“I know that,” he snaps, annoyed. “He didn’t do anything I didn’t want him to.”

Taylor is breathless in her confusion, her hurt. Tears sting at her eyes. “What does that mean?”

“It means it didn’t go farther than I allowed it to.”  

Her legs are so weak she can barely stand. She feels the tears streaking down her cheeks, licked away by the icy tendrils of wind almost as soon as they fall. “I don’t understand, if you knew… _why_?”

“It’s about con-trol,” he says, stalking towards her. “And _losing_ it. It’s about finding what makes you tick, about finding your breaking point.” He stops when he’s standing in front of her, when only a thin line of space separates them, scarcely enough space for even the wind to pass through. Then he looks her up and down, and the disgust in his eyes makes her want to curl in on herself and never face him again. “I thought you knew that.”

The insult stings, but not as much as the knowledge that he had known the whole time—just like Meredith—and had not intervened.

 “You’re despicable!” she cries.  

“And _you_ ,” he snarls, crowding her space, gloved hand suddenly gripping her jaw, pulling her even closer, “you have the audacity to look surprised. You know what I am. What you are. What I made you to be.” He releases her, and Taylor lifts her hands as if to push him away, to strike him—but when she raises her eyes to his she sees the adrenaline there, the excitement, as if he wishes that she would. He _wants_ her to hit him.

“It’s too late to play the martyr now.”

Taylor hangs her head, cries even harder. This isn’t how this was supposed to go. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. She had imagined their reunion a thousand different times, in a thousand different ways, and none of them had gone like this. In none of them did she cry, and in none of them did he look at her with such putrid revulsion.

She wonders if he must sense this, because suddenly his gloved hand is on her cheek, and his touch is soft, almost deceptively tender. She looks up at him through blurry eyes, her brows furrowed in confusion.

“Your problem is that you don’t _trust_ me,” he says, so quiet she nearly has to strain to hear him. 

“I do trust you,” she whimpers, knowing how pitiful she sounds. Knowing she’s lying.

“Look where you are,” he says, gesturing to the bridge they’re standing on, what she had almost done, “all evidence points to the contrary. If you really trusted me,” he says, “you’d know that I was waiting for the opportune moment.” He raises his brows, knowing he’s caught her interest. “I had to lay down the edges of the puzzle before I could begin to fill in the middle, see?”

She feels the wind on her cheeks and the tip of her nose, knows they’re red because of how badly they sting from the cold. She sniffles, and then shakes her head. “I don’t understand.”

Mr. J leans forward, bringing their faces closer, so close she can feel the heat of his breath across the bridge of her nose. “I _saved_ him for you. Nathan.”

Taylor swallows the lump that’s formed in her throat. “Saved him?”

A wild burst of color in the sky suddenly sprouts above them, followed by an explosion of crackling sound that nearly splits her ear drums. She cranes her neck towards the night sky, where it’s set ablaze in a burst of golden light. More colors appear—red, then blue, purple, green—and she watches the cascade of sparks fall like rain, and the colors disintegrate into wispy tendrils of smoke before a new burst of color tears across the black.

_Happy New Year._

When she looks back at Mr. J, she sees his outstretched hand, and her gaze trails lower until she sees what it is he is offering to her. And suddenly it all makes sense.

A knife.

She lifts her head, meets his gaze—his eyes which never left hers—and searches his expression, desperately trying to read what’s behind those black eyes.

She lifts her hand to his.

She takes the knife.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Lethe” is a river in the Greek underworld that, when drunk from, made lost souls forget the sufferings of life. Directly interpreted, it means “oblivion” or “something to make you enter oblivion and forget.”
> 
> “Antiscians” are people who live on opposite sides of the world, “whose shadows at noon are cast in opposite directions.”
> 
> When the Joker talks about “waiting for the opportune moment”, he’s talking about waiting for Taylor to reach a boiling point. He has to wait until he knows she’ll be ready to kill for him if he asked, and he has to know he’s given enough time to Nathan to do to Taylor what he will, thus furthering Taylor’s despair—despair which eventually will bloom into anger, hatred, et cetera. It’s difficult to explain this in the narrative because this chapter is told from Taylor’s POV, and she often fails to grasp how the Joker continually manipulates her. He also speaks to her in abstracts because he knows it’ll go over her head.
> 
> Last thing: I’m knee-deep in Star Wars right now, and a lot of dialogue/imagery in this chapter has very much been (unintentionally) influenced by my multiple viewings of The Last Jedi… can you tell?


	3. Chapter 3

_Memories are dangerous things. You turn them over and over, until you know every touch and corner, but still you'll find an edge to cut you._

— _Mark Lawrence_

**Part lll**

He hadn't  _actually_  planned on coming back for her. Not really. Maybe briefly he had entertained the idea, just once, during midnight hours, when his mind had slowed enough to allow the unbridled passage of such a thought. But there was no real intent behind it, like the way you think about something you plan to do, and then simply don't do it. He knew that seeing her once would be enough.

That was what he had thought, anyway. He'd  _thought_ once would be enough—that it would sate this need, put this fire inside him to rest—but he is incalescent. His insides blister from the heat of it. Seeing her had only made it worse, a lone spark catching on a loose fiber, causing flames to erupt, angry and vicious, setting fire to the whole tendon. And it was spreading, threatening to consume him whole, from the inside out. This aching need, this  _burn_ , it would not abate. He itched with it, like something crawling within his own skin, something he could not reach. Somehow it was even worse than before.

Before, when she was only a distant memory, a faraway thing, he could only wonder at how time had shaped her: what she looked like, what she sounded like, the things she might say. He could wonder about the exact shade of green in her eyes, whether she would pull away from him in repulsion, or draw closer in fascination. He could wonder about her complexity of thought, the things she fantasized about, her insecurities, hobbies, sensations she loved, hated—taste, touch, sound, and sight, these arbitrary things that helped to craft the larger whole of her being.

Now he  _knew_ , and that still wasn't enough.

It still wasn't enough.

He talked himself down from it at first, like a man trying to reason himself away from the ledge.  _It won't solve anything._   _You don't have to do this._

But he did have to do this, didn't he? Maybe he should have known from the beginning that it would come to this, that this need would not be sated until she was gone from him completely. Erased.

He would have to kill her.

He'd meant to, of course. That was the  _plan_. But even the best laid plans could backfire spectacularly. He'd thought—perhaps in a moment of careless weakness—that the two of them could exist in the same plane, that he could go on with his life and she could go on with hers, and their carefully plotted lines would not intersect. Not on this map. They could be like two ships passing in the night, neither one aware of the other, both going unseen.

But he'd fired cannons into the dark. He went _looking_  for her. He fired cannons that crackled against a black-lit sky—like thunder that is too close—and listened for that tell-tale splintering of wood, the sound that he'd hit his mark, struck gold. His course set, now, their allision unavoidable.

He shouldn't have done that. He knows that now. Should have ceased fire, doused the lanterns. Should have captained his ship like a wraith, set a different course, should have sailed silently on that smooth, dark ocean, the only sign of his presence noted by the extra ripples in the waves.

But of course it's too late to go back. He's done the wrong thing, and it feels too good to stop now, not when he's in the thick of it. He's surprised at this part inside him that claws at him to keep going, to take this further, see how far he can push before the veil is ripped away, the illusion shattered.

And he's surprised by how much he wants that to happen—Taylor's disillusionment. It'd be a thing of beauty, breaking her, like slicing through papier Mache, how easily it wrinkles, then tears. He's desperate to shatter every belief she ever held about the world, about herself, to turn it inside itself, so the fleshy sheen of carcass is visible for the world to see.

And in the end, she'll want this. That will be the best part. She'll beg for it, for the truth of things, and it'll taste so bitter, syrupy and thick, hard to swallow, yet she'll cry for more. More, more, _more_ , and then soon it won't be enough. There will be nothing more to ask for, nothing to fill this new hole, this gaping, cavernous void, and he'll have nothing left to give.

And then she'll beg for death, and he will give it to her.

And that's how it all starts. In the thick of it.

There's something green caught on her upper lip, a fleck of basil from the spaghetti sauce. A quick swipe of the tongue, and it's gone. Taylor eats until her plate is a white, barren landscape, looking as shiny and clean as it does when it's just emerged from the wash.

It's their eighth outing together. Summer, now, the city soaked in it, the humidity so heavy that it drapes itself over Gotham like a second skin, a less porous one, like the thick, rubbery rind of an orange peel. The city is verdant, blooming at every corner, the kind of lush green you can sink your teeth into, tear off something heavy to chew. Scrapers sparkle under a sunstruck sky, the city vibrating with the sort of restless, fizzy boredom that thrums low in your belly only between the months of June and August, when summer is at its peak.

He takes her to a different place every time. It's safer that way, for her and for him. This time it's an Italian joint, something familiar and benign, tucked away in some back alley he frequents every once in a blue moon. Mob-owned, to be sure, but he knows how to blend when he wants to, knows how to duck low, shrink his shoulders, slink along unassumingly—just another sonofabitch with a fucked up face. Just another loser down on his luck.

It's Taylor that draws the most attention.

She's wild-eyed at the table. There's something feral in there, a nocturne creature frothing at the mouth, chasing things that move, eyes squinted against the sunlight, lost in the day. She eats ravenously, the way you do when you live with the constant fear of someone picking off your plate, the way you eat when you know the bigger kids get the bigger portions, and you better eat yours fast or they'll be scrabbling after yours, too. He knows to wait until she's completely finished before beginning to open her shell; he the crowbar, she the clam.

And oh, she does  _beg_  to be pried.

He watches her lay her fork down on top of her plate, wipe her mouth with the back of her hand. When she looks up and meets his heavy gaze, her cheeks flush, and she sinks her teeth into her bottom lip, apologetic. Embarrassed. Maybe she think she should have used her napkin instead of the back of her hand. Maybe she thinks she ate too fast.

"I'm sorry."

He looks at her, unblinking, and tongues for a moment at the Y-shaped scar on his lower lip. "Do you want dessert?" he asks.

She nods, too quickly, and then blushes at that, too, at her overt enthusiasm, her eagerness. He fails to hide the upturn of one corner of his mouth as he waves the waiter over, as Taylor's eyes eagerly scan the menu, as she tells the Joker what she wants, as if he has to approve of it first.

It's something velvety and thick, with drizzles of warm, triple decker fudge on top, and a rounded scoop of French vanilla ice-cream cradled on the side. She dives into it as soon as it's set down in front of her, and doesn't stop until she's finished.

The waiter—twenty-something, lanky and crater-faced, speaking only Italian—takes their plates away without a word. And then it's just the two of them. Just the two of them, and Taylor wilting like a sun-beat flower beneath the weight of his gaze. The way he looks, and looks, and looks, like there's no end to her.

She squirms a little in her seat, nervous hands tucked between her thighs. She's wearing jean overalls that are too big, and a white and navy polka dot t-shirt that's too small, with a scalloped rim around the sleeves. She kicks her white Converse sporadically beneath the table. She's knocked his shin twice, and she flushes over that, too.

There's an air-conditioning vent above their table, and the icy, recycled air that blasts down hard from above smells old, like wet dirt that dries instantly under the beating of the sun, or freezer-burned vegetables. The air blows a loose strand of hair from her braid free. He sees the goose bumps prickle across her arms, hairs standing at attention, like land mines lit up, all triggered at once.

"Why do you always look at me like that?" she asks.

"Like wha _t_?"

She shrinks in on herself a little, almost too embarrassed to say. "Like… like you want to  _eat_  me."

"Don't know about that," he says, flippant, looking away, his tongue working at the thickened ridge of scar tissue stretched across the insides of his cheek. His gaze flits back to hers. "Don't know what you  _taste_ like."

Taylor flushes again, only this time she has to look away, shield her eyes from him. It's the first time he's ever said something so openly explicit to her, and he delights in the way she must immediately seek shelter from his gaze, as if she is a proper lady and not a child, and she has been undone by his uncouth behavior.

She is quick to redirect her attention, to cast a glance around them, as if somebody might have heard. As if anyone actually gives two shits.

It's Tuesday, and it's two PM, and the two of them are joined by only a handful of other patrons—a drunk, at the bar, nursing his fifth tequila. An older man, blind, from the looks of it, the kind of regular who minds his own business, and two men in the corner in expensive suits, talking in low, hushed tones. Sex traffickers, probably. The kind of men who look like they could work on Wall Street, who do important things in big, important buildings, who slave from nine to four, who go home to their wife and kids, who clap politely at piano recitals for their daughter and cheer in the bleachers at baseball games for their son. And he supposes that's part of the allure, isn't it? Normalcy, the biggest lie that men sell, over and over again, without consequence. Just a nice looking man, an upstanding citizen, someone you could trust, someone moral, upright. Who is to say otherwise? Who dares to prod at the underbelly of such a great beast?

But he sees the way the two of them keep looking at Taylor, knows she has caught their obvious interest.

He observes the waiter, who keeps their drinks coming, and later, the chef and owner of the restaurant comes out himself, his apron-adorned, protruding belly presiding over the table like a second set of watchful eyes. The Joker's gaze flickers to them off and on. He notices when one of them turns around in their booth, looks at Taylor, and then turns back, and then the three men share a low chuckle amongst themselves, some little inside joke, maybe that she'd be easy prey, or that she's probably a virgin, or that she'd be a tight fuck.

The terrible thing is that they're not wrong.

The Joker's frown deepens, and he works his mouth, irritated. He commits their faces to memory. Knows he'll see them again.

"Let's get out of here, doll face."

He likes the way she flushes when he calls her that, the way she preens so prettily beneath the easy, sordid shadow of his endearments, which he casts to her often and freely. Anything to draw her closer under his damaged wing.

There's nowhere to go, no curfews to meet, and the day stretches out before them like the infinite expanse of some uninhabited desert scape, the way it rolls on, and on, and on, until the dirt blends into sky, and the horizon takes on a blurry, indefinite shape.

It's a grotesque, warping heat that heaves itself upon the back of the afternoon. The kind that has him sweating at the pits, his shirt clinging to him within minutes. The kind where mirages glimmer and tremble in the near-distance, only to disappear upon arrival and reappear further on, always moving, always unobtainable, like the infuriating madness of chasing your own shadow.

There's a stillness in the air, a heavy sort of stagnancy that crouches low over the city, watchful of the gathering storm. Hurricane season. It will not rain for another couple of days as the storm carefully unfurls itself, crawling on hands and knees towards the spine of coastline, but the air is thick, electric; suspended, almost, like the trembling rigidity of a steel cable that has just been pulled taut between two points.

The streets are quiet and empty, as if it's been cleared just for the two of them. They walk, and Taylor prattles on about school and exams and easy things. Harmless things, things with no meat to them, no bite, but he doesn't stop her. Doesn't interrupt.

She'd struggled to open up to him at first, some of their meetings punctuated by nothing but silence on her end. He had unsettled her with his rapt attention. He knows she was self-conscious of how inconsequential her world must be to him, how little he must care. But he'd surprised her when he'd asked her questions about her life, the superficial things, like what was she learning at school? What was her favorite subject? Did she have any friends? What did she like to do in her free time? What made her happy? Most of these questions he already knew the answers to, but he let her believe that he didn't, that he hadn't started dissecting every bit of her life from the moment he saw her for first time in eleven years in that tiny room at the orphanage, to the moment they share now.

But she'd gradually opened up to him after that, after finding a way to climb over that initial hump of self-consciousness.

And it was painstaking effort on his part, tearing down her walls, brick after brick, carefully peeling off her layers, gently, slowly, one by one, until she is nothing but raw, pink skin, until he knows everything, until there is nothing she will not say to him, no secret she can hide. Everything she is, every thought that she has, every move that she makes, it belongs to him.

It all belongs to him.

This is a knowledge he shamelessly relishes in; this knowledge that he has created her.  _I am designer_. She is the product of his own flawed conception, even if she cannot see it yet. He marvels at his lasting influence, the impression he was able to make on her, even as a child. Everything from the way she tongues at her bottom lip—something she does frequently, but especially when deep in thought—to the way she cranes her head when she's prompted with a question. Little things. Small things. But he knows she unconsciously retrieved those nuances from him. He watched her mimic him as a child and knows that it's habit now, muscle memory, something she'd actively have to think about  _not_  doing if she ever wanted to stop.

He watches her out of the corner of his eye as they walk. She's all nervous energy and pent-up animation, rushing over her words, gesticulating with both hands, glancing up at him with frequent regularity, as if surprised she still has his attention. No one's ever listened to her talk for this long before. He has to encourage her to keep going when she trails off at the end of her sentences, as if she's just realized she's said too much and she now must resume her silence.

He _likes_  listening to her talk, knows he'd find it mind-numbing if it were anyone else, but it's her, and somehow she continually succeeds in fascinating him, even now, even after all this time. And that's the crux of it all. He is haunted by this one, singular thought: that he may never have his fill of her.

He may never be sated.

Sometimes her honesty surprises him, her sincerity catching him off guard, stopping him in his tracks. She has that effect on him. That  _power_ over him.

He turns around to face her where she's stopped on the sidewalk. "What did you just say?" He says it like a statement, not a question. Daring her to say those words to him again.

She swallows, her brows pushed together, looking more earnest and sincere than he's ever seen her. Maybe even a little afraid. The baby hairs around her forehead are dampened from sweat, curling in on each other. She brushes them away with the back of her hand. Flustered, now. She doesn't like to have to repeat herself, to explain things.

"Did you ever think about me? Before—before all this?"

Before their reunion at the orphanage, she means. The zero years. The quondam space in time where he had tried in vain to not let her exist, where he had tried to tie her down in an empty, unused space in his mind, tried to distance himself from her, keep her as nothing more than a faraway thought, some distant, irretrievable idea, flung out in space. The space in time where he had, instead, held her memory in a tightly clenched fist.

There's an alleyway with a dumpster and some broken, empty crates. Steam pours thick from nearby pipes, pounding the pavement, dampening it. He looks around them for a moment. There is no one in sight. He grabs her by the straps of her overalls, hears her sharp intake of breath as he yanks her into the alley without any forewarning. Then he's pushing her into the concrete wall, hard, the wide expanse of his hand against her neck before she can stop him. He stares at that—his hand against the long, pale column of her throat—and feels dizzy with the way her esophagus convulses for air against his palm. He clenches harder. Hears her choking. Then he allows his gaze to snake upwards, her eyes, filled with fear, unshed tears. She grips his wrist with both hands. She thinks he's going to kill her.

He leans low, so they're eye level, so his sour breath wafts over her, so she can see his yellow teeth. The rot.

"I'm always thinking about you," he snarls, angry—angry at her for drawing forth from him this rotten, bloody abscess of an admission, reeking of infection, rank with decay. His fingers burn with the need to tighten even further around her throat, to force the breath from her lungs, like squeezing air from a plastic bag. Wonders about the lyrical quality of her crunching esophagus, how brittle the bones, how malleable the rings of cartilage that line her throat. He leans even closer, makes sure he's captured her eyes. "Don't ask questions you already know the answer to," he growls.

He lets her go. Steps back.

She gasps when her breath returns. Stares at him, wide-eyed.

"I'm sorry," she croaks. It's pitiful how desperately she needs to fall under the shadow of his good graces. His favor. And yet somehow he still finds reason to revel in it. He welcomes her fragility, encourages it, lines rows of dynamite against the outside walls of her glass fortress in an effort to weaken them. She is pliable this way, moldable, like clay, easier to craft into the exact shape he wants her to be.

He collects himself. Turns away from her. Keeps walking. He offers her no abditory, no hiding place, no remission from the outside world, and yet still she follows. Bound.

Heat coils tight in his abdomen when he turns around to glance at her, sees her staring at the ground, at nothing, a hand cradling her throat, maybe wishing his fingers were still there, maybe still feeling the phantom heat of them. The finality. He turns around so she can't see and grins to himself. Flattens his palm against his abdomen, smooths down his shirt. Pleased.

There's a shift in the air, tangible to the two of them. The wind picks up, hot, unforgiving, like being caught in the clenches of a giant, clammy fist. The sky is sallow looking now—bilious—like an old, yellowing bruise. It casts a sickly pallor all over, pancreatic, almost. They walk through the city like this, overcast in this jaundiced shadow, and he realizes they'll have to part soon. He can tell she knows this from the way she instinctively draws near to him. She always does this when she senses their time together is drawing to a close, like a train about to depart from the station, when the final warning has sounded.

There's a park close by. He takes her to it, and as they cross the entrance—which is punctuated by looming iron gates on either side—a long-forgotten sensation shimmies up his spine, a certain vicissitude, like being welcomed back at Arkham, crossing that familiar threshold; crossing that threshold after his plans had fallen through, after Taylor had been taken from him. He looks down at her then, almost as if he expects her to be thinking about the same thing. But he can see her thoughts are elsewhere.

A jogger passes them, paying them no heed as he does, glancing down at his watch. The park clears the further they go inside, and he sees it's practically empty. They stop at the large pond that the park is centered around. He sits on a bench beneath a gnarled tree. She doesn't.

It's even quieter here, the trees absorbing the ever-present hum of the city, even as the wind picks up, pushing through the knotted branches, making them sway. He makes himself comfortable, throws an arm along the back of the bench, spreads his legs wide, tongues at old scar tissue—tissue he continually reopens with his teeth—again and again—and then soothes over with his tongue, liking the way the thickened scar tissue gives way to raw, slippery mucosa, thin skin, wet with blood. Liking the tang of copper as it slides down his gullet.

He watches her by the water, where she stands in the grass, near the edge, watching ripples form, the result of tadpoles, bugs, a wayward gust of wind. He think she looks fragile here—brittle, a doll constructed out of diaphanous threads—like she might unravel, or disintegrate into dust if someone so much as speaks to her above a whisper. He likes that about her, her careful fragility, her innate vulnerability, the cords of which she's ensnared in. He knows that's why the men at the restaurant were staring at her, why Nathan stares at her, what men  _see_  in her, and it's all the things she doesn't say, but holds close in her wide, hopeful eyes, her parted mouth, the hungry desperation in her gaze whenever she feverishly scans a crowd, looking for a face to trust, someone to tell her everything will be okay. It's the kind of tenuous beauty that attracts only a certain kind of men—men like him.

It's the first time since the bridge that they've been totally alone like this, away from prying eyes, removed from scenarios where another person could barge in at any time, interrupt, ruin this carefully laid moment he's been cultivating since the beginning.

He doesn't speak because he knows she has something to say, can see it in the weight of her shoulders, the thoughtful, downward turn of her mouth, the way she keeps rubbing her elbows, almost like a self-administered hug.

They stay like that for a while, him on the bench, her standing by the pond's edge, her back to him. Finally, when the silence has stretched on for too long, and he has grown impatient, he goes to her. He stands behind her—at enough of a distance where she won't feel suffocated, but she  _will_  feel the intensity of his presence, the solidity of his gaze, a weighted, physical burden. He doesn't have to pry her with words, no. He knows she feels the heat of him in the way she trembles, almost imperceptible if he didn't see right through her.

"I don't know if I can do this," she whispers to him, at last bringing an end to their silence, baring herself to him, peeling back her soft edges, ripe with vulnerability, with uncertainty, ready to be plucked, taken, devoured.

"Do wha _t_?" he says, pretending he doesn't know, wanting to hear her say it aloud, give voice to her fear so that he can sharpen it, perfect it, wield it against her.

"Nathan," she replies, barely above a whisper, like it should be obvious, like she hates that he's making her say it, like his name alone leaves an acrid, filmy tang on her tongue. She turns her neck halfway, so her voice carries over her shoulder, her eyes downcast. "Why can't you just take me away from here?" she asks, so soft. "Forget about him. He doesn't matter."

The Joker growls, a rumbling sound pulled forth from somewhere deep in his chest. A warning. He takes a step towards her. Close enough now to see the blonde tufts of baby hairs around her neck, the prickling of goose bumps that have erupted on her arms. Close enough so that when he bends towards her ear, she shivers. "That's not. The poin _t_."

She whips around to face him, angry, and he thinks— _finally_.

"Then what is the point?" she cries. "I just—I just want to be with you," she says, quieter now, deflating a little, her eyes soft. Pleading. " _Please_ … I know… I know you want to be with me too." She swallows, looks up at him in a mixture of trepidation and knowing—goddamn her,  _knowing_ —like she thinks she's got him all figured out, like his soul is out there, laid bare just for her.

The fingers of his right hand curl into a fist. He has a half a mind to grab her by the throat again, pin her up against the tree, or drag her kicking and screaming into the water, hold her beneath the filmy green surface until her lungs are so full of water she sinks to the muddy bottom. He doesn't touch her. He doesn't have to. Her gaze laps up to meet his, and he captures it, holds her there in the dark cavern of his eyes.

"You have no _idea_  what I  _want_ ," he says, carefully, slowly, enunciating each word with a purposefulness that does no escape her. "I'm not asking you to do this. I'm telling you." He shifts his weight, changes tactics, leans in closer, so she's enveloped by him, so he's all she can see. "You  _need_  this." He licks his lips. "You need  _me_."

He can see her falter beneath the heat of his gaze, can see her about to take a step back, a feeble attempt to engineer a fraction of distance between them, some semblance of space, as if that will somehow lessen the heady truth of his words. He doesn't reach out for her, doesn't touch her, but lets her know with one look that moving would be a very bad idea. So she doesn't.

Her eyelashes are wet, and she scrunches her nose, as if to keep herself from crying harder, and the freckles across the bridge mush together before smoothing out again. She looks everywhere but at him.

"I thought I'd feel… hate. Anger. But all I feel is this… this crushing sadness. Like I just want all of this to be over."

The Joker's mouth thins, pulling into a straight line. "You think he took from you something you can never get back, isn't that right?" She looks up at him sharply because that's exactly what she thought. " _I_  took that from you first," he says. "Remember that. I  _will_  take that from you, when this is over."

"What if I don't want you to?"

She must think there is something defiant in her gaze, because she looks up at him when she says it, her chin thrust forward, bravely meeting his careful dissection of her, but all he can see is her quivering bottom lip, her frightened eyes, the tear tracks on her cheeks.

He closes the distance between them. Lowers his voice. "You'll want it," he says, with the authority of someone who knows. He does reach for her then, looking down at her, wrapping his fingers around her chin with deceptive delicacy. His eyes are hard, full of malice, things that clamp down with a vice and don't let go. "You'll beg for it."

He watches her eyes search his, and for a long moment, she looks lost—broken—like she's finally succumbed to him, like she's embraced this sacrilegious truth at last. But then she rips her chin from his grasp, and there's a new fierceness in her eyes—a brand new fire he intends to douse, so that not even a stray spark remains.

But she doesn't deny him. And that, perhaps, is all the affirmation he needs—the absence of denial, somehow sweeter than acquiescence itself. It's the not-so-secret knowledge that she is fighting it, fighting him, and failing. Her walls of resistance crumbling, the glass weakening, starting to splinter, a massive array of spider-webbed cracks have begun to take shape.

* * *

Three weeks have passed. They haven't set a date yet for what they both know will come, but he can tell she knows that the time is drawing near, that their time together is just filling empty space now, it's all white noise, the walls are beginning to close in around her, and she better move fast if she doesn't want to get crushed.

It's a Thursday afternoon. It's hot and too bright. They meet at their usual assembly point, but he cannot be fucked to meander around the city with her today, her trailing at his heels, dripping all over him with her nervous anticipation, both hopeful and afraid he'll reveal some raw, uncomfortable truth about herself that she has to grapple with, hoping beyond hope that afterwards he'll comfort her, maybe pull her into a tender embrace, smooth over the wound he inflicted, like a dog lapping at its own bloodied flesh after a fight.

He takes her to the warehouse he is occupying instead. It's damp and cool and smells industrial and metallic, like gasoline, like rusted car parts. He thinks at one point it used to be an airplane hangar, a point of contact between the Narrows and the mainland for some small, private business sector—but in recent years had morphed into a storage facility for cars that didn't sell, cars with malfunctions that were beyond repair, cars that might still be salvaged, but had to be shipped back to their respective manufacturers overseas in order to do so. The manufacturer has been laid to rest, now, and all that's left behind are the non-salvageable, parts that didn't make it, or cars that weren't deemed good enough to be shipped back, the skeletal remains of those who couldn't even qualify for a junkyard burial.

"Is this where you live?" she asks, looking around in open fascination, drinking everything in in a capacity that only she can, shrouded in childlike wonder, like it's some beautiful palace with a fucking golden chandelier and marble checkered floors, delectable art of the fruit-in-a-bowl variety, a winding staircase that leads to the master suite, like the whole room sings to her in rose-gold hues.

He doesn't consider himself to be "living" anywhere, per say. It's just one place to occupy until the next one comes along.

"Welcome to my humble château," he says in response to her question, offering a low, sarcastic bow, and a fleeting grin that that is quick to fade.

She stands in the entrance, near the thick strands of translucent plastic that flap in the wind and act as a door. They make a wet  _thwap_  sound behind her after she's stepped through. And then she stands there. The sun behind her, blasting through the plastic, haloing around her as she holds herself prim and proper, hands folded against each other, like she doesn't know what to do with them. She bites her bottom lip and looks around, like she's waiting to be invited further inside. He thinks she looks stupid, and  _pretty_ , and he can't bring himself to look away.

She takes a few tentative steps inwards, looks up at the massive ceiling, with its dust-caked skylights and rusted, metal rafters. She probably thinks at one time it must have been beautiful, as all things once are—except for ugliness that is born, not bred. Ugliness so pure and unfettered there's no constructing it, it simply is, and always was, like God. Like  _him_.

There's a small inlet—a square room constructed in the corner of the warehouse—probably used as a control panel of sorts, or a makeshift office. She moves past him to inspect this small space, with the yellowed papers scattered across the floor, like leftover bodies on a battlefield long forgotten, papers that are furled at the edges, or torn. The exposed pipes on the wall, covered in fluid that had once leaked but is now dried, tacky and hard. There's an L-shaped desk pushed tight against the wall, with not an exposed surface of tabletop in sight; everything from mutilated car parts, bolts and exhaust pipes, black, rubber flesh from a ruined tire, to forgotten pens and screwdrivers, a circular saw, clamps. Taylor is drawn to a typewriter, covered in a sneeze-inducing layer of dust and a power sander, which she carefully heaves aside to reveal the prize underneath. The Joker stands in the doorway, watches her finger the keys, the letter  _J_ , like a good girl.

It's dark in here, but there's a beam of white sunlight—tangled in the rafters, fighting its way into the dark room—that catches on her arm. He studies this, the soft, glaucous pallor of her skin, the blue-green veins tangled on the inside of her wrist, gently pulsing beneath thin skin. His mouth tastes dry. He laves his tongue along his bottom lip, where he can taste the chalky leftovers of greasepaint.

"How much do you remember?" he asks. He likes how effectively his voice shatters the careful silence that had enveloped them, how her hand stills on the typewriter, and then drops completely.

She turns around to face him. "It comes to me in waves," she whispers. She looks away, at a crack snaking its way across the smooth, concrete floor. "Mostly I remember the good moments. When you were kind to me." She smiles a little at this, like this is something she wants to hold onto, like she's struck with some fond moment in particular. He almost wants to ask which one. He does not remember being kind to her. "But I remember the blood, too." She looks up at him. Swallows like there's something thick in her throat, like it's hard to get down. "I remember—that man. We killed him.  _I_ killed him."

He stares at her.

"I don't remember why," she says, brows furrowed. Troubled. "I keep… I keep telling myself he deserved it, that it was self-defense. But I don't know if it was."

"Would it matter?"

She looks up at him, confused. "What do you mean?"

The Joker rolls his eyes skywards. "Would it matter if he deserved it? Would that, uh,  _absolve_  you of your sins?" The 's' slithers off his tongue like the hissing of a snake. "Would that make you feel  _better_  about yourself?"

Taylor still looks confused. She thumbs distractedly at the inside of her wrist, where he had just been staring. "Y—yes?"

"Well it  _wasn't_ ," he says, starling her with his intensity, with the black in his eyes. She drops her hands, looking lost again. "It wasn't self-defense. You killed him because I told you to. Because you  _wanted_ to—"

"I was a child!" she cried.

"And you were complicit. You didn't fight it. You  _loved_  it."

"Stop!" Taylor grabs the sides of her head like it's about to explode. He knows he's toying with her carefully constructed memories of that night. Knows that as he lays down the words, sets the framework for the scene, her mind does the rest, filling in the gaps in all its perfect, gory detail. "That's not true, I didn't. I  _didn't_."

He steps closer, effectively blocking out the small chunk of sunlight. "You did. I  _watched_  you. And you couldn't stop—not until you'd had your fill. Imagine—all that bloodlust in a child. You were  _insatiable_. I'd never seen anything like it. Never seen anything so disgusting." He was blending fantasy and reality, so seamlessly she could no longer tell the difference. He stalks towards her, until the last thread of sunlight that had set light to the floating particles of dust had been entirely put out, blocked by his hulking frame. "You have something wrong with you—here." He cocked a finger gun against her head, pointing.  _Bang._  "There's a devil in there. You are sick.  _Unwell_." His words tangle around the double "L's", a warbled sound disentangling itself from his mouth, like he delights in saying them. "You will spread like wildfire," he goes on. "Like a  _dis-ease_. A virus. Even I won't be able to stop you."

"No!" she screams. Suddenly she is on her knees in front of him. She clings to his leg with an intensity that surprises him, burying her face in his thigh, breathing heavy, clinging to him with everything she is worth. "Please, please, stop me," she gasps. "Make me well. Please, make me good. Make me good."

Tears stream down her face. He can feel them seeping through his pants. He pets her hair, cradling her skull, sifting his fingers through the strands, and is suddenly reminded of her as a child, when he'd done this same thing, a memory so far and distant it feels almost as if it had occurred in another timeline, another universe entirely.

His hand slows, then stops. He's struck with a new feeling suddenly, his sentimentality withering almost as quickly as it had come. He grips her hair in a fist instead.

"I will," he promises. He yanks her up, suddenly, drags her out of the room, back into the hangar, where there's a gaudy orange, grease-covered couch pushed against a nearby wall. He bends her over the armrest, pushes her head into the cushions. "I will make you good."

His weight is over her for a moment, his mouth at her ear.  _Don't move_ , he says.

So she doesn't. She lays her cheek against the dank cushions, breathes in the fibers, smelling the dampness, the mold.

He knows he's gone for a while, that the anticipation must be eating her up. And he knows that, when he returns, she thinks she hears the sound of something sizzling. She attempts to lift her head, but he is quick to force it back down.

"I will make you good," he says again. He slots his thighs against the backs of hers as he leans over her, so she can feel the full, sobering weight of him. His hand rucking her shirt up her back. She squirms beneath him, uncertain.

"Mr. J—" she says, hesitantly, breathy.

"Lie still," he warns.

There's something dangerous in his voice that makes fear spike inside her. She cranes her neck just in time to see the red-hot tip of an iron poker, something you'd used to stoke a fire.

She shouts at him, tries to dismount, but he's heavy on top of her, splays his hand against her spine and holds her down. This is a fear like she's never known. The fear of pain.

"Wait,  _wait_ —!"

The iron tip comes down on the fleshy portion of her back, the meat of her hip bone, on the right side. Her whole body seizes, and the sound she makes is guttural, like a dying animal, crying into the night. She digs her fingers into the couch cushions and screams until her voice is hoarse, until her throat is raw and there is no more breath in her lungs, and her mouth hangs open in a soundless cry. She drools all over the tacky orange cushions. Can't help it. Layers and layers of skin burn away right before his eyes. It only takes a second, but he knows how pain—pure, unfettered pain—winds it hands around the clock, makes time slow to an inexorable crawl.

Taylor screams with a blood-curdling intensity and tries to jerk away when he manipulates the tip of the poker, creating a fishing-hook sort of curvature. He repeats the motion several times, until he's sure he has it right, until he's sure it's deep enough, and then he pulls away. He lets the iron clatter to the hard concrete with a clang that echoes in the absence of her screaming.

She pants and pants, tries to catch her breath, calm her quivering lungs. Her fingers unclench slowly, begin to unfurl from their vice-like grip on the couch cushions, and every muscle in her body feels tight, sore, strung out. She feels as though she's been electrocuted.

"My  _good_  girl," he coos. He thumbs over the J, delicately, in a parody of a loving gesture. She barely has the energy to flinch away. She looks over her shoulder at him through blurry eyes, her cheeks ruddy, tracked with tears. He knows under any other circumstances, she'd feel exposed like this. Embarrassed. But he sees something different in her eyes, something he can't quite place. His mouth twitches, something about her stare unnerving him, something seditious in there, maybe, stripping him of his thorough certainty. Why does that bother him so much? Why does that  _excite_  him so much, the uncertainty, the thrill of not knowing exactly how she is feeling?

Her eyes lower, that fierceness dimmed, and she weakly pulls her top down, as if to grant herself some semblance of privacy. He stares at her as she crawls forward, pulls herself further onto the couch, so she's no longer bent over the arm rest. Beautiful like this, he thinks, for a fleeting moment, the untethered rawness of her.

"Mr. J…" she whimpers, looking up at him.

"Don't you, uh… don't you want to see i _t_?" He feels fire in this moment, torching him from the inside out, eager for her reaction, hungry for her compliance.

She twists—weakly—onto her side, propping herself on an elbow and craning her neck to see the inscription on her side. His mark. His branding. She hangs her head, probably thinks back to the way she had traced the letter J on the typewriter, only minutes ago.

"Mine, now," he says. He knows his eyes are black, knows it in the way his blood sloshes around inside him, hot, excited. She's lying on her stomach, too weak to gather herself into a sitting position. She turns her head to look at him, holding herself up on her forearms, but only slightly. She unconsciously digs her fingers into the upholstery and he nears, stalking towards her, kneeling, on one knee. He has to duck his head some so they're eye level. "I, uh," he looks skyward for a moment, tongues at scar tissue. "I  _will_ make you better," he says. "Only I can do that."

She cries then, tries to duck her head away from him, like she's ashamed she's asked this of him. Like she wants to hide.

He reaches out, snatches her by her chin. " _Look at me_  when I'm talking to you." He studies her for a moment, like a sculptor admiring his work. "Say it."

She blinks at him. There's snot dripping from her nose. Somehow she can't be bothered to wipe it away.

" _Say it_."

"Only you," she whispers.

His mouth splits into a grin and he leans in closer, tightening his grip on her jaw. "Only me."

She can't miss the way his gaze flickers to her mouth, that oh-so-purposeful downward trajectory of his eyes before they rise to meet hers again. He notes the way she colors, the slight intake of breath. She does flatter herself.

"You should be careful," he warns. He lets go of her chin. Stands so that he must look down at her, so she has to look up at him. "I  _bite_."

He knows his ear-splitting laughter lingers with her long after he's departed because when he returns, sometime later, when dusk has fallen and he finds her asleep where he's left her, she's curled herself into a ball, hands over her head, her ears, as if to block out the sound of him.

He smirks.

There is no escaping him, not now. Not ever.

Not till her death.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please scroll to the bottom of the chapter prior to reading to heed additional content warnings if you are easily triggered.

_When is a monster not a monster?_ _Oh, when you love it._

— _Caitlyn Siehl_

**Part IV**

It burns like  _hell_.

Taylor closes the bathroom door behind her with a soft click and heaves a long, shuddering sigh, something that feels like it's been tucked inside her all day, waiting for this moment. Waiting for this moment where she can drop the charade, let down her defenses. Tears have lodged themselves in the back of her throat, high and tight, but her eyes are dry, as if there is no more water left in her body to shed. She is exhausted. Strung out.

She flicks on the light, and the bulb shudders and clicks, like it can't make up its mind for a second. And then she's staring at herself in the mirror, at her skin—sallow, pale—marred with bruises that have blossomed into a garden variety of differing shades. She stares hard at the purpling half-moons beneath her eyes, so dark they might as well be bruises. She thinks she looks sick— _unwell_ , isn't that what Mr. J had said?—like one of those leukemia kids you see on posters outside the bus station.  _Donate Now to End the Fight Against Cancer._

She studies her hair, tangled, in need of a thorough wash, and her nails, ragged, the skin around them tender and raw from her own worried teeth. Her mouth, too large for her face, and her eyes, vacant,  _afraid_ beneath everything else; that thousand-yard stare she thought you only ever saw on men returned from war.

When she breaks eye contact, it feels like relief. Her shirt comes first, which she peels off carefully, slowly, wincing when it brushes up against her hip. Her jeans next, which take a moment, because her hands tremble, and her fingers keep slipping around the button.

They fall to the floor, pooling at her ankles, and her underwear follows. She gingerly steps out of them, wanting to make as few movements as possible.

And then she stares at herself in the mirror like this. At her jutting ribcage, all her bony prominences, elbows and knees, the preface of breasts, her redpink nipples. And her sex, overflowered, she thinks. Embarrassing. She doesn't think it's supposed to be that way, but she's only ever shaved her legs, and she's scared to take a razor anywhere else.

For a fleeting moment, she wonders what Mr. J would think of the space between her thighs, wonders if he'd be repulsed or intrigued. Aroused. Nathan had touched her there, once, but she must have jerked away so violently that it ruined whatever fantasy he had been constructing, because her underwear snapped back into place and he continued rutting into the warm space her pressed together thighs had created. Smart, to do it that way. If he didn't penetrate her then there was no physical evidence to trace back to him if she ever tattled on him.

But Mr. J… she imagines herself flat on her back for him, the feel of his hands as he gently parts her thighs—he would be gentle, wouldn't he?—and then the sudden warm, wetness of his flat tongue, pushing up against her, licking her up like she's ice-cream about to melt. She imagines the sounds that she'd make, and that he'd be spurred by them. Turned on. Maybe he'd grip her thighs harder. Maybe he'd moan, too, or maybe all she would hear is the wet sounds of his mouth between her legs. The fantasy fizzles and goes flat before it even really begins to take shape, and she turns hot at the thought, embarrassed that something so perverse would even cross her mind.

 _What is wrong with you?_ she wonders.  _Pervert._

Mr. J is older— _much_  older. He would never think of her in that way. Shame settles somewhere low in her belly, followed by exasperation at her own idiocy. He isn't attracted to pubescent girls who don't even know what a first kiss tastes like, girls who have never probed at their own openings, girls who can't even put a name to pleasure. He probably likes real women, older women, women with generous, soft curves and full breasts. Women with pretty, clean fingernails, women who wear three-inch heels and have bouncy hair, who strut down the street looking like they've just stepped out of a magazine, and have the confidence to match. Women who know how to pleasure themselves, and especially women who know how to pleasure men.

She is discouraged by this thought and tosses it away, not sure why she wants to be needed by him so badly, why she craves something as unobtainable as his desire, his lust; maybe then she'd serve some greater purpose to him. He'd have new reason to keep her around.

She bites her lip, hard. She knows what comes next. She turns her back to the mirror, inhales, and then cranes her neck to look.  _Look_.

_My good girl._

She sees the 'J' there, raw and angry, burned through several layers of flesh. She can't think about the finality of it, the fact that this is something she will have to live with forever. She focuses only on how much it hurts, the excruciating tenderness of it, even several hours after its birth. Why does it hurt  _so much_?

When she lifts a leg to step into the tub, she grimaces. And when she turns on the showerhead and the ice cold water assaults her skin, she cries as if she's been stabbed. She has to put a hand against the cool, slippery wall to steady herself, to force herself to remain beneath the heavy spray of water. It pounds her skin, relentless, and she takes her free hand and clenches it into a fist, sticks it in her mouth. She bites her knuckles until they bleed.

And she does cry, then. It should be poetic, the way her blood and tears swirl along the rim of the drain before being rinsed away, but she hates it. She hates the pain, hates the way it manifests itself in the form of her tears, her bloody knuckles, but she cannot bring herself to hate the man who inflicted the pain to begin with.

She can't even hate the branding, because she realizes its significance, marvels at it, in fact. Finally, she belongs to something, to someone. Her fleshy, corporeal reminder that she means something to someone. That she is wanted. No, owned.

_Mine, now._

She is wracked with a full-body shiver at this realization, even as the rest of her has grown numb to the onslaught of water. She would let him brand himself all over her, she realizes, over and over again, like a reoccurring bad dream. She would lend him every piece of flesh if he asked, generously expose to him every bone, let him singe her every nerve, let him dissect her tendons, line them in rows and play them like strings on a harp. She would bleed herself dry for him, and let him carve his name on the interior lining of her vessels. Let him pry apart the bones of her skull, inscribe himself all over her gray matter. She would welcome him to print his name on her tongue. She'll open her organs to him, and he can engrave his name there, too.

There is nothing she would not do for him, and it terrifies her.

Still, the pain is easier to stomach after this. She cries until there is nothing left to cry, and then she shakes with the force of her shivering as she turns off the water, steps onto the flattened bath rug. She pulls a towel from the rack and begins to wrap it around her, but before she can she catches a glimpse of herself in the mirror and is transfixed. The 'J', raw now, angry and red from being blasted with water, seems to wink at her, playful, coy, like it knows something about her that she doesn't.

She stares at it a bit longer—even attempts to brush her fingers over it, just as Mr. J had done, but the pain is too much, and her body recoils instantly, as if being burned a second time.

She puts on an oversized sleep shirt, tugs a pair of clear underwear up her legs, dries her hair as best she can, and then drapes her wet towel over the shower rod. It's late now. She's missed dinner already, she knows. Her belly growls in want, and she knows she won't be able to sleep if she doesn't get at least a little something.

The stairs creak beneath her weight as she quietly pads down them. Evelyn would ground her for a week if she found out Taylor had snuck food from the kitchen, but she's too hungry not to risk it. She thinks Mr. J has made a point of making sure she eats when they're together—or perhaps it's just habit now, that he takes her out every time they meet—but today he didn't, and it hasn't gone unnoticed by her stomach.

The kitchen is dark, lit only by the small light above the stove. She thinks opening the fridge might be too risky—the suctioned  _pop_  always seems magnified when the house is asleep—so she goes for the pantry instead, hoping there'll be chips, or maybe cereal she can snack on, dry.

She's surveying the interior of the pantry in the dim light when there are suddenly hands below her waist, grabbing at her from behind. She lets out a sharp exhale in surprise, realizing instantly it's Nathan, knows it by the smell of his aftershave, that spearmint gum he always chews, and his lack of deodorant. She can feel his fingers digging into the 'J', on her right side, and the pain is so severe she cries out, ripping herself free of his grasp. She spins around to face him and is greeted by his furrowed brows, and the tight line of his mouth.

Her face crumples. He's in a bad mood.

"You're so fucking skittish," he says, keeping his voice low, dangerous. He takes a step back, not to give her space, but so that he can see her better, so he isn't blocking so much of the yellow light from the stove. "You've been staying out late these past couple of weeks," he comments, almost conversationally, she thinks, if not for the accusation laced within the undercurrent of his words. She picks this out carefully. She has become an expert on deciphering all his hidden meanings, all the things he doesn't say but implies, just from the tone of his voice.

The 'J' still stings from the phantom pressure of his fingertips, and she has to school her expression into one that is unfazed.

"That's none of your business," she says, instantly regretting her split-second audacity. She considers his lack of reaction a kindness, a rare, one-time only free pass. A get-out-of-jail-free card.

"If I want it to be my business, then it is my business," he replies. "You got a boyfriend now, is that it?" He crosses his arms, then smirks at her. "Don't know who would want to fuck a skinny bitch like you."

"It doesn't seem to be much of problem for you," she retorts, not sure where all this brass is coming from. She's two-for-two now. She knows she should cool it, that retribution is bound to follow for what she's said, but the words feel too good when they slip off her tongue. She says them almost as if she were watching the scene unfold as a third, unidentified party from somewhere else in the room. She feels proud of herself in this moment, for the first time in her life, even while a chain of fear coils low and heavy in her gut.

Nathan steps towards her, shaking his head, and with the pantry at her back, there's nowhere to go. That chain in her belly pulls taut, strangling her insides.

"You're nothing but a hole to be  _fucked_ , do you understand? You think I can't get ass anywhere else?" He looks her up and down, like she reeks, like she's dead vermin, or the leftover remains of some vulture-infested roadside kill, the kind where the guts are strewn all over the hot asphalt, sunbaked and crawling with insects. "Whores like you are falling at my feet,  _begging_  to be used."

The brutality of his words leave her breathless, like a slap to the face. She doesn't know what to say. She wishes more than anything her fire would return so she'd have something quick-witted and clever to mouth, something sharp and biting and under-the-skin. Mr. J would know what to say, she thinks. He always knows what to say.

"You worthless cunt," he says, and he takes a calculated step closer, lowering his voice. "I should bend you over right now for being such a fucking brat."

Taylor draws in a breath and takes a step back, suddenly too conscious of just how easy that would be, of the fact that she's wearing an oversized t-shirt and no pants. But even more terrifying than that is the thought of him rucking up her shirt and seeing the 'J' imprinted on her skin, still fresh, hot, throbbing in time with her feverish heartbeat. What would she tell him, that she did it herself? That it was just a joke, a prank, a dare?

"Please…." she begs, as if that's ever helped her in the past. If anything, her pleading has only ever seemed to spur him on; Nathan subscribes to that very specific brand of male who takes pleasure in denying mercy, pledging allegiance to the belief that men are superior, and women are merely objects to be taken and used for sexual consumption. This, he has made more than clear.

She decides to change tactics. "I'll scream," she warns.

"Sure," he retorts, because he knows she won't. He's trained her too well. He put the fear of punishment in her. The fear of pain.

She uses her last out. "She'll hear you," she says. This, at least, is true. Evelyn's bedroom is on the first floor—technically an office, but after the bedroom upstairs suffered water damage after a particularly nasty pipe burst some years ago, Evelyn had relocated to the unused office on the ground floor. Now the master bedroom is moldy and damp and uninhabitable, and the repair costs more than the house itself.

"Later, then," he says. Is that a promise? He smiles at her as he steps aside, as if so say, "after you." She eyes him warily, and then she is darting past him before she can give him an opportunity to change his mind. He doesn't make a move to stop her, but she can feel his eyes following her all the way up the stairs, and she self-consciously tugs her t-shirt lower over her thighs.

She thanks God—or whoever is listening—that Meredith is asleep in her bed and not at a friend's house. She settles under the covers as quietly as she can and lies on her belly and listens to it growl. Feels her heart thumping against the mattress, matching the throbbing pulse of the 'J' on the back of her hip. She thinks about Nathan's words, thinks about the hatred burning in his eyes when he called her a whore. Told her she's a hole to be fucked. And she also thinks about Mr. J, and that night on the bridge. The knife.

She thinks about the knife. And it's hard to sleep.

* * *

The next several days pass in a slow and unbearable haze. At their last meeting, Mr. J had told her he was going out of town to "take care of a few things." The thought of him leaving Gotham almost had her on her knees in front of him, beg him not to go.  _Don't leave_   _me_. Somehow, she had managed to keep her composure, even if the news formed an anxious knot in her stomach she couldn't untie. He had promised to see her in three weeks. Twenty-eight days. That was all.

She discreetly marks the passage of time on Meredith's floral-themed calendar, using a soft-tipped pencil and a feather-light touch, so the little diagonal line she draws through each box is barely visible to the naked eye.

Taylor can think of little else but his return. She spends her days outdoors, roaming the city, sometimes visiting their usual haunts just so that she might better recall the memory of the two of them there. It's never enough, though, and she ends up missing him even more.

On Thursday, she begs Evelyn for some spare change so that she can go see a movie at the dollar theater.

Evelyn, after much prodding, heaves and sighs and makes a big to-do as she rummages through her emerald green purse, the dingy, faded pleather beat-up from years of abuse. A stick of gum falls out, and Taylor makes sure Evelyn doesn't see as she slips it in her pocket for a night when she's hungry, or in case she gets grounded and sent to bed without any food.

She watches her foster mother fuss and rummage through the junk that's collected in her bag. She remembers a saying, something like you can tell a lot about a woman by the contents of her purse. She wonders where that came from, and she wonders what the contents of Evelyn's purse would reveal about her. She sees a checkbook and too many pens, discarded candy wrappers, missing buttons to clothes that she no longer owns, a coin purse with scratched, brass closures, a handful of brown paper napkins, like the ones you get from fast food restaurants, a pack of Kleenex wrapped in plastic, a handful of used lancets, to check her blood sugar, loose mints—the white, sugar-free ones—and a thick stack of coupons held together by a dirty rubber band. She doesn't know what each individual item would say about Evelyn, or even the contents as a whole. Do they reveal that she's a bank teller who sits behind a desk all day, accepting checks and doling out wads of cash and dumping coins into an automatic coin-counter from behind a thick sheet of translucent, bullet-proof polycarbonate, like some kind of automaton? Does it reveal that the majority of her bi-weekly paychecks are funneled straight into her expansive grocery bill, and that the monthly check that comes for Taylor from the Department of Children and Families is used only to assist in escalating Evelyn's unhealthy addiction to food?

Does it reveal that Evelyn can no longer climb the stairwell to the second floor? Does it reveal that perhaps the real reason the water damage in the upstairs bedroom was never fixed was because Evelyn found it too cumbersome to climb up the stairs in the first place? Does it reveal that Nathan had to build and install a wheelchair ramp up to the house because she could no longer climb the five stone steps that led up to the porch? Does it reveal that she tips the scales at well over three hundred pounds, or that three toes on her left foot had to be amputated, courtesy of complications to her diabetes? Does it reveal that her insurance only pays a fourth of the cost for her insulin pens, which she doesn't even use?

Does it reveal that Taylor goes to bed starving most nights from her scarce portions, or that Evelyn has started installing locks on some of the kitchen cupboards to prevent Taylor from sneaking food? And does it reveal that every morning when she leaves for work, she stuffs as many packs of Hostess cupcakes in her purse that will fit?

Does it reveal that Taylor is just one out of a handful of other foster kids who have lived under this same roof, kids who "didn't work out" and failed to acclimate to the warm, fuzzy environment welcomingly provided Evelyn and Co?

Taylor wonders if the contents of a woman's purse could possibly say all that, if anybody could really know even a fraction of the truth just by looking at the junk that someone carries around with them from day-to-day.

Evelyn extends to Taylor three quarters, two dimes, and a nickel, held out in a sweaty, meaty palm—like the palm of a chubby toddler, she thinks—and Taylor takes them and gratefully stuffs the coins in her pocket and heads straight for the theater.

It's a hot, sticky day, and all she wants to do is sprawl out in an cool, dark theater and not think about Mr. J for an hour and a half—and not think about the pain in her side, which has gotten worse over the past couple of weeks instead of better.

The theater is musty and dank and smells like sweat and stale popcorn. Taylor's sweet tooth aches in want when she eyes the box of Sour Patch Kids in the display case at the concession stand, but the candy costs more than her ticket did, and she bites her bottom lip and tries not to think about it as she heads to Theater #3.

She shifts in her seat uncomfortably throughout the movie, unable to find a position that doesn't make her branding sing in agony. There's only two other people in the room aside from her, but it's midday and the movie isn't even very good and she finds it hard to focus when she can't sit still.

At the end of the movie, the two characters engage in a warm embrace and say "I love you" and promise they'll always be there for each other, and Taylor doesn't know why it makes her so sick to her stomach all the sudden, but she doesn't even make it to the end credits before she is bursting out of her seat and rushing to the bathroom to vomit in the toilet of the nearest open stall. To her horror, she misses the toilet almost completely and has to watch as the brown contents of her breakfast splatters all over the seafoam green tile floor. A sob escapes her, a mixture of pain and embarrassment. She vomits again, this time into the toilet, and is repulsed by the sound of her emesis splashing against the sides of the toilet. She pants and leans against the stall door—tacky with soda and buttery popcorn fingerprints—to catch her breath.

She hurries to rinse out her mouth at the sink—afraid someone will come in and find her mess—and wipes at the leftover spit with the scratchy brown paper towels that come out of the dispenser—the remaining last two. Her throat burns from the acidic, regurgitated contents of her stomach, and it's hard to get that brown taste out of her mouth no matter how much sink water she drinks between the makeshift bowl of her cupped-together hands.

She thinks she should attempt to clean up her vomit, but she's so embarrassed by it, and looking at it makes her want to throw up all over again. She just wants to leave as quickly as she can. She works hard to school her features into one of passivity and nonchalance as she exits the bathroom and keeps her head down, but she can't help but notice a woman who just left the same theater she was in is about to go in the bathroom. She walks a little faster and glances at the short, overweight boy manning the concession counter, with his flat nose and short neck and his eyes that are spaced too far apart—characteristics she recognizes as Down syndrome—and wonders if he'll be the one who has to clean up her puke. Her face turns red-hot with shame, and guilt sloshes around in her belly with all the other unsettled contents of her stomach. She hurries out of the theater and vows she'll never show her face there again.

The sun accosts her as she pushes open the double doors and steps out. It's even hotter now than before, and she's sweating hard after just three blocks. She forces herself to stop on the sidewalk, under the shade of a post with a billboard advertising Stanley & Stanley auto insurance.

The 'J' throbs in time with her pulse, and it's unlike any pain she's ever felt before, like the dizzying kind you get drunk on right before you pass out. She sways for a moment and reaches out for the pole, steadying herself. Something wet oozes down her side. She looks down at her shirt—waiting for the multiple images that have appeared before her eyes to blur back into one definitive shape—and sees that it's damp. Her heart clenches in a fresh wave of fear. She looks up, ahead, to the nearby 7-Eleven. She propels herself towards it with sheer force of need, barely hears the bell ring overhead as she pulls open the door and follows the sign advertising the bathroom, navigating around aisles of chips and beef jerky and glazed pastries and boxes of twelve ounce soda cans stacked along the edges of the wall. She pulls on the handle of the woman's bathroom door and finds it locked, so she waits impatiently and clutches at her side and tries to revel in the air conditioning.

When the door opens she barely looks at the former occupant before rushing in and slamming the door behind her, turning the lock and blinking under the heavy white fluorescents. In the mirror, she is almost startled by her appearance. Her face looks hot. Feverish. She frowns and puts the back of her hand to her forehead. She's burning up, and she doesn't think it's just from the heat.

She rucks up her shirt and turns sideways in the mirror, looking over her shoulder at the reversed 'J', which is an angry, vicious red, crusted over and oozing.

For the first time, she's scared. What is she supposed to  _do_? She can't go to a doctor, and there's no way she can tell Evelyn. Mr. J isn't supposed to be back for another three days.

The pain has become excruciating, and it borders now on unbearable. She tries to wipe some of the pus away with the toilet paper she carefully wets beneath the faucet of the sink, but it tears in half and flops onto the floor in a soggy heap.

She needs Mr. J.

She doesn't know what to do.

Panic creeps up her throat. She has to find him.

The place they frequent—his house, if that's what she can call it—is on the other side of town, but she thinks she can remember the way. He's only taken her there twice, but she has to try.

When she steps out of the bathroom, looking haggard and sick, the man behind the counter eyes her uncertainly.

"You okay there?" he calls. Her eyes drift towards him almost as if in slow motion. "You lost or somethin'? Need me to make a phone call?"

Taylor shakes her head at the man and then regrets the motion, feels like she has to puke again. She runs out of the store and doesn't stop running until her lungs feel like they'll burst and she's red in the face and sweating.

The journey across town is treacherous and long. She can only guess at how many miles she's walked. She gets lost twice along the way and has to retrace her steps, think really hard about landmarks she remembers seeing the last time Mr. J brought her here.

When she sees a dock with one solitary, bright yellow plank amongst the other brown, decaying boards, she knows she's close.

She sees it then, not long after, the familiar shape of the building coming into view. She heaves a sigh in relief that comes out more like a strained sob.

As she nears, she notices a van parked out front, which strikes her as unusual because she never thought to wonder if Mr. J owned a car—she'd never seen him with one—but also because the lot is usually empty.

She knows she shouldn't get her hopes up because he probably isn't there, but she can't help but want, so desperately, for him to surprise her, for him to have returned earlier from his trip than planned.

She draws closer to those translucent pieces of plastic that hang over the doorway and suddenly is afraid. What if Mr. J doesn't want her here? What if he has cameras set up and can see her from wherever he is? Will he be angry that she came here by herself?

Her trepidation makes her slow some, but she doesn't stop. It isn't until she's almost reached the entrance that a figure emerges through the plastic flaps. She's so startled at seeing another person—someone that isn't Mr. J—that she instinctively takes a step back. It never occurred to her that Mr. J had moved, or was occupying some other space and that someone else had taken over in his absence.

The man stops in his tracks. He's younger—at least, younger than Mr. J—his skin sprouting with several colorful tattoos, and a smattering of piercings. His clothes appear to be stained with oil. He looks relatively unassuming, like any of the dock workers she passed on the way here, but Taylor still keeps her distance just in case.

He looks at her, and she looks at him, and she waits for him to say something, or to tell her to scram, but he doesn't do either of those things. He doesn't even look confused to see her. Instead, she sees something like recognition in his eyes, like he's seen her before. There is something too intimate about his gaze, she realizes. Something too knowledgeable in that stare, like he knows things about her that even she doesn't know. It's unnerving in a way that makes goose pimples erupt over her arms, even despite the fact that it's hot, and she's dripping with sweat.

"Hey, boss?" His voice is deeper than she imagined. He is craning his head towards the doorway, even as he keeps his eyes fixed on her. Taylor is immediately on edge. "Think you're gonna wanna come out here."

Taylor realizes too late that this is a bad idea. She wants to run, now, but would she make it far? Would they follow her? What if the reason Mr. J went away was because his hideout was discovered and he had to leave Gotham for a few days to lie low? What if she's just ruined everything by coming here? What if she's put him in danger?

There is no time to wonder, as another figure emerges from the doorway.

At first, she thinks,  _it can't be_ , but then her brain short-circuits in surprise, and she is so overcome with emotion upon seeing him that she freezes in place, looking like a deer in the headlights.

It's not Mr. J.

It's the _Joker_.

She realizes the last time she saw him like this was when she was a child. Their last moments together, when she was cruelly taken from him. When he laughed. That was how she last saw him, keeled over in the snow, officers flanked at his sides while he clutched at his stomach, laughing so hard he could barely breathe. The snow around him flecked with blood.

The hairs on her arms stand on end despite herself, in spite of the heat, and she stares at him in his purple three-piece suit and thinks he looks even more imposing than usual.

And that white greasepaint, those black, dangerous eyes. His blood-colored mouth, punctuating the puckered scar tissue crawling up the sides of his cheeks.

She exhales in something like relief, even though it terrifies her, seeing him like this.

"Mr. J," she croaks, hating how cracked her voice sounds.

"Sweetheart," he croons, delighted, and she catches the way his eyes light up, which scares her a little. "What a  _surprise_  this is." The way he says it frightens her, all cloying and sweet, and she hugs her arms over her abdomen, sealing herself off from him. He makes no effort to move towards her, and her fear has immobilized her, rooting her to her spot there in the loose gravel.

She is anxious, afraid, seeing him like this, in his full getup, like the way he appears on TV, and in the paper. The way she imagines him in all her nightmares. She tries to swallow down her fear, but she is scared to approach him.

"You came back early," she says. She hates the way her voice warbles. She always hates the way she sounds when she talks to him, like she's small and afraid, skittish—and even if she is all these things, she hates to put them so openly on display for him. She bites her bottom lip and looks between him and the man standing next to him, suddenly feeling uncomfortable with a third party looking on. She's not sure how much she should say in front of him. She doesn't want to embarrass Mr. J, or say something too intimate that might betray the more sordid details of their… friendship. Whatever this is. She swallows around the pile of words tangled in her mouth. "I—I missed you," she says.

"Of course you did, pumpkin." He gives her an exaggerated frown, like he's saddened by this, but also like he half expected this admission. "Come tell Mr. J all about it," he says, sticking an arm through the plastic flaps in the doorway, holding them aside for her like a curtain. Welcoming her.

She hesitates for a moment, and she knows he sees this, but she can't take it back, now that he's seen the fear in her eyes. He nods his head towards the door, silent, encouraging.

She swallows and glances at the other man, wondering what his role is in all this, what it is exactly that he does for Mr. J.

Tentatively, she moves towards him, conscious of him watching her every move. She steps inside, hears the plastic flopping back into place behind her, and then sees the long, sharp lines of Mr. J's shadow cast overtop of hers, against the concrete floor.

Alone, now, she turns around to face him, and he looks down at her expectantly, hands clasped behind his back, like a small child, almost innocent, aloof, even—except she knows he is anything but, and seeing him like this, up close, steals her breath.

She is awarded with a memory then, sudden, this flash of red, and something wet, warm, coating small hands— _her_  hands—and a supine body on a tile floor. She doesn't remember his name. But she remembers the blood, and the pitch of his cries, and the way she made him suffer, for hours on end.

_You were insatiable. I'd never seen anything like it._

The flashback fades almost as soon as it had come, and then she is looking up at the Joker, as if seeing him for the first time, and she is afraid all over again. She is so afraid of him, she realizes, her mouth bone dry at the thought of all the terrible things he could do to her. All the terrible things he has already done.

She knows he senses this, this acute fear. She spots the irritated—or is he pleased?—quirk of his mouth. He doesn't say anything, and she watches him instead stride towards that little office, the one with the typewriter, and shut the door. She frowns at this, wondering what it is that he felt the need to conceal, but then he is all business, clasping his hands in front of him, standing near that familiar orange couch, tilting his head at her.

"Come, come," he gestures, waving her over, impatient, or perhaps annoyed at having to tell her twice.

She goes to him, slowly, wincing with every step. She is so sore from the walk, it hurts to even move. But that pain is nothing compared to the burning in her side. She just wants him to cut the whole thing off, desperate for instant relief. She doesn't know how much more she can take.

As she nears, the Joker's head cocks further. His eyes narrow in his scrutiny and he hums. "You don't look so good, kitten."

She stops just shy of him, still wary. It's an effort just to meet his gaze, which settles heavily on top of her.

"I think it's infected," she manages, biting her lip. She is almost embarrassed to say this, as if she is confessing to a parent she has contracted an STD, as if the oozing 'J' on her side couldn't possibly be anything but her own fault. "Please…." she implores. She doesn't even know what it is that she's asking for. She just needs something. Anything.

The Joker hums thoughtfully, his eyebrows drawing together in concern. "Let Mr. J take a look, hm? Bend over."

Taylor freezes.  _I should bend you over right now for being such a fucking brat._

She carefully swallows down the hard lump that's formed in her throat. "Can't I just stand?" she asks meekly.

She watches him carefully, and for a second, he looks angry at having been disobeyed, his eyes narrowing with a dangerous glint, but then he softens—as much as someone like the Joker can, anyway—and offers her a saccharine smile.

"Of course, sweet pea," he says, with just a bit too much honey. He circles her, coming up behind her—the smell of gasoline and sweat so heady and close—and then he is kneeling, one knee, and she bites her bottom lip as he lifts her shirt, exposing only as much skin as he needs to.

She cranes her neck to peek behind her, watching as he tears off one leather glove with his teeth. He lets it drop to the floor, and then the pads of his fingers are brushing over the 'J'. And he does it almost as if in reverence, like caressing something religious and ineffable, some sacred relic. But the look in his eyes is feverish and hot, and she doesn't know if she likes that or not.

She cries out and flinches away when his fingers press too hard. "Stop!" she gasps. "Please, please don't touch it," she whimpers. "It hurts."

"Now, now, let daddy have a look." He grips her sides with both hands now, holding her steady, and her face heats up at their proximity, and the way he is holding her, and she hopes he doesn't notice.

She waits is anxious silence for his careful inspection to end, and when he hums again, thoughtful, and lets her go, she exhales in relief.

"What is it? Is it infected?"

He grunts in affirmation. "Have you uh, have you been  _touch-ing_  it?" he asks, something almost accusatory in his voice, but something knowing, too, almost like he would be pleased by this knowledge.

He stands to his full height, and she stares up at him, knowing how guilty she must look. Of course she touched it. She touched it all the time. She touched it in the shower. She traced her fingers over its outline on the bus, when no was one looking. And in bed, she laid on her side and brushed gentle fingertips over it every night until she fell asleep.

"I only—I just—" She falters openly, not sure what she wants to say to defend herself. "What are we going to do?" she asks instead, panicked. She can feel the sweat beading at her temple, and she irritably wipes it away with the back of her hand. Somewhere in the back of her mind she realizes she's trembling a little, that she has the chills again, but she ignores this in place of her growing panic.

"Wait here," he instructs. She watches him disappear inside the office. She attempts a glance inside before the door closes behind him, but all she sees is cardboard boxes. She knows those weren't there before, and she wonders what's inside them.

He emerges after only a moment, and then he is disappearing to another part of the hangar, in the direction of the bathroom. When he returns, she notices his face is dark, heavy, and he's holding a wet washcloth and some type of salve in a tube, like the kind hydrocortisone cream comes packaged in.

"Bend over," he says, almost like a dare, challenging her with his dark eyes, and this time she doesn't question him, even if it takes her a moment to compose herself and comply.

She does it with as much dignity as she can muster, holding her chin up even as she lays down over the arm of the couch—just like the first time. She balls her hands into tight fists and tries not to grit her teeth, for some reason wanting to remain passive for him, show him she is unaffected by this.

The Joker grins behind her, but she doesn't see that.

He cleans the area first, with the cool washcloth, and she works hard to hold herself still and tries not to whine as he sloughs away at layers of crust and dead skin. She bites down on her tongue to prevent any noises. After, he puts the salve on with his bare hands, and she unconsciously makes a small sound as the cool gel sinks into her overheated skin. "Oh!" she gasps, startling a little, before his warm hand settles on the small of her back to keep her still. "Oh…." The relief is instant, and it feels so good. She closes her eyes and her whole body uncoils. She sags against the couch and sighs. The burn is gone, now, even if the raw tenderness still persists. It's a dull ache compared to the intense, throbbing pain from before.

"There, there," he says, and she opens her eyes. "All better."

She pulls her shirt down and slowly gets up. She still feels feverish and hot, and she's broken out into a cold sweat from the exertion of trying to keep still, of having her muscles clenched so tight in pain for so long. Her lips are dry and cracked, and her mouth tastes sour. She's struck by a wave of dizziness, now that she's upright.

"I… I think I'm going to be sick again."

Phosphenes behind her closed lids, swollen and fuzzy around the edges. She almost loses her balance, but then her vision whites and clears, and she is running to bathroom before he can reply.

When he finds her, she is kneeling on the linoleum floor, stained with grease, as she dry heaves over the toilet. Nothing will come.

She feels his looming presence in the doorway behind her, his gaze raking over her, hot as coals, and she hates that he has to see her like this, pathetic and dirty, clinging to the rim of the toilet that reeks of piss. She cries and stares at the orange rust stains circled along the inside of the bowl, like planetary rings.

To her astonishment, she hears him step further inside the bathroom, the thick, solid heat of his presence palpable behind her. Then she feels a gloved hand scooping up the strands of her hair, cradling it in a gentle fist.

He's holding her hair back for her.

Her heart swells, some dormant sensation she is not readily familiar with, and a sob escapes her. Then his fingers dig into her neck a little, and goose bumps ripple like a tidal wave over her skin. She's never felt this way before, so empty and so full at the same time, both too hot and too cold. She heaves a few more times, and his fingers massage some indeterminable pattern against her neck throughout. When she's finished, she goes boneless, sagging over the rim of the toilet.

He lets her stay like that for a few minutes. She feels weighted by the silence that's stretched between them, but his hands on her—in her hair, on her neck—are so tender she doesn't want to break the spell by moving.

Eventually, her back can no longer take the strain, and her knees ache from being pressed against the floor, so she lifts her head and wipes her mouth with the back of her arm, and the Joker lets go of her hair. She hears the sink running, and then there is a paper cup full of water in front of her. She meets his eyes briefly, but accepts it without question, downing it in one gulp. He gets her another, and she drinks that, too.

He holds out two white pills then, laid against the purple leather of his open palm.

"What are those?"

"Antibiotics. Take them."

She looks at them. And then she doesn't know what compels her to do it, but instead of reaching for them, she finds herself wordlessly opening her mouth instead, extending her tongue to him, just slight. Then her gaze carefully slides to his, not sure what she will find there.

And the look in his eyes makes her heart somersault. The way they darken, pools of black, and the parting of his mouth, almost imperceptible, before settling into a fixed line. She doesn't breathe as she waits for him, and the moment feels hypercharged with something she cannot identify, something she has never felt.

He feeds them to her, placing the pills on her tongue with the pad of two fingers. She takes them into her mouth, scooping them back with her tongue. Swallows.

Then he's grinning at her, manic, and she can barely even see the whites in his eyes anymore. "Such a good  _girl_ , aren't you?" he says, but his voice is different, rougher than before, no longer laced with that cloying sweetness from earlier.

There is something unpredictable about him in this moment,all the sudden, something uninhibited and dangerous and loose. She is conscious of this energy in a way she has never been before. Perhaps it's seeing him with a full face, in this three-piece suit she has too many book-cornered memories of. But she's scared, and something in her baser instincts kick in, some instinct to put some distance between them. She doesn't think he's going to hurt her, not really, but she can never interpret the blackness in his eyes when he's like this, or what that means for her.

She makes to scoot back on her knees before she gets up, but he reaches for her before she can, wrapping a hand around her chin, pulling her up and towards him so that she is standing in front of him. She doesn't resist him.

And it's not rough, the way he pulls her two him, but he doesn't let go of her either, even when she's standing, and she thinks it's impossible not to look at him like this, up close, with his eyes smeared in black, like staring down the hole of a very deep well, trying to find some spot for your eyes to fix onto, some glint of shifting water at the bottom, some exit point, an end to the seemingly infinite depth.

He lowers his head and hunches his shoulders towards her, bridging some of the distance, and she stares at him, transfixed, and finds nothing. There's no exit, here.

"Time to go, don't you think?"

His voice pierces through her trance, and she bites down on her lip. Frowns. Even like this, when every nerve is lit up and oscillating with unease, she doesn't want to go. Her need to be near him overshadowing her fear.

"Can't I stay for a little bit longer?"

"Daddy's  _busy_ , sweetheart." He pulls her closer to him by tugging on her chin, and she comes in a single fluid motion, standing too close, now, so that she has to tilt her head back just to look at him. "You wouldn't want to interrupt me while I'm  _working_ , would you?"

Taylor's gaze flits past him, to that closed office door, but then she feels his fingers tighten around her chin, and her eyes slide back to his. She realizes for the first time that his greasepaint is fresh, like it was just applied. There's no open patches of skin peaking through, no bleeding of colors. What if he had been just about to go somewhere before she arrived?

"But—when will I see you again?"

He cocks his head at her, looking affectionate. Adoring. "Real soon, cupcake." He moves from grasping her chin to sliding the flat of his palm along the side her face, tracing the tips of his fingers along the line of her jaw, just a little too hard to be considered tender, but she wants to close her eyes and lean into it all the same. "I'll make sure of it."

"What if it gets worse?" Already she feels like the throbbing in her side has returned, but maybe that's just the physical manifestation of her anxiety, readying itself in anticipation of their departure.

"You let Mr. J worry about that, hm?"

He lets go of her, and she instinctively leans forward, as if to chase after the loss of warmth from his hand.

"And if I need you? If it's an emergency?"

"Then you know right where to find me."

He leaves her with a parting smile, looking amused, playful, with something both bright and too dark in his eyes, like he's thoroughly enjoyed this interaction, like he got something out of it, or learned something new. But she feels not quite sated, still yearning for some other parting gesture to take place between them. She wants him to say that he missed her while he was gone, or that he looks forward to seeing her again, that he hopes it will be soon. She wants the two of them to embrace, like those two characters in the movie. She wants to feel the purposeful movements of his arms wrapped around her middle, the pressure of his body against hers, solid and close. She wants him to say he'll always be there for her, that the two of them will be together forever. And she wants him to say that he loves her in the same way that she loves him. She wants his obsessive need for her to be matched by her obsessive need for him. She wants them to need each other in all the same ways, so that she might exist as his lacuna, fit him like a missing puzzle piece, or like a glove, and that he might exist in that same capacity for her.

She wants this reassurance from him so badly that she aches with it. She thinks it must be written all over her face, how desperately she wishes, and wants, and needs.

He lets her use the bathroom and get cleaned up. And then he arranges for the man from earlier to drive her home. She learns that his name is Ressling.

She is disappointed that Mr. J can't take her home himself, but she doesn't want to annoy him by complaining about it, and she knows he's busy.

The last thing she hears him say before she leaves is, "Make sure she eats." He says it quietly to Ressling, out of earshot, in a way that makes her think she wasn't supposed to hear, so she pretends not to, even though her mouth starts watering at the mere mention of food. She hasn't eaten all day.

She gets into the white van—those white vans they always tell little children not to get into—and the Joker stands watching from the doorway, arms crossed. She waves to him over the dashboard, but he doesn't return to the gesture.

Ressling closes her door for her and then gets behind the wheel, and the engine turns. Taylor watches Mr. J in the side-view mirror until they turn the corner and she can no longer see him. And then she lets out a weighted sigh, missing him already, anxious and impatient for when she will see him again.

Her need—his name—bleeds itself all over her tongue, and she says it over and over again in her head, already constructing the details of their next meeting in elaborate detail, fantasizing about what he might say, what he might do.

She looks down at the brown paper bag in her lap. He'd given her an orange bottle of the antibiotics, and the cream he applied earlier—with no instructions on how frequently to use them—so she hopes she'll be able to make do on her own.

Ressling cuts through her thoughts and asks her if Wendy's is okay, and she sits up straighter in her seat, nodding with perhaps too much enthusiasm. A couple minutes later, he's pulling into the parking lot of a nearby Lowe's—too risky to go through the drive-through, too many cameras—and she waits impatiently as he goes across the street to retrieve her food. He returns with a single paper bag, and her eyes light up as she sees the Jr. cheeseburger, large fries, a Coke, and a Frosty.

"Thank you," she beams. She is already digging in.

He lets her eat there in the parking lot, with the setting sun hot and yellow on the dashboard as it dips behind the gray shopping center. He doesn't start the car until she is almost finished with her milkshake. Afterwards she feels full and a little bloated, but finally sated. She leans back in her seat and doesn't mind as much that the seatbelt cuts into her neck.

It's dusk, now, the city washed in it, the sky the color of dark blue jeans. Ressling rolls down the windows and turns off the air, and Taylor likes that better, the sound of the wind filling the silence between them. She rests her arm on the door, lets her head fall back against the headrest, enjoying the wind pulling at her hair, the way it feels on her skin. She can't remember the last time she was so content, so at peace. The interstate is free of traffic at this hour, and that's nice, too. She enjoys the sound of the rolling pavement beneath the tires, the ripple of the pavement whenever they change lanes, or when they're on the exit ramp.

She doesn't realize she's fallen asleep until she's woken by the sound of someone clearing their throat. She jolts awake, looking around, not sure where she is for a moment. Then she sees Ressling looking at her, and she relaxes.

The van is parked along the curb, and she sees they're in a residential area, a neighborhood of old, overcrowded apartments. It used to be an assisted living community, but that was several years ago, before the stock market crash, and it was in such a beat-up part of town it had since transformed into lower-income housing.

This is a shortcut, and she thinks he must know the area well if he knows this specific route to her house. When he looks at her and doesn't say anything, she understands this is where she is supposed to get out. She suspects it might be too risky for him to drop her off too close to home. The walk is not long from here anyway. She takes her brown paper bag and opens the door.

"Thank you," she says, before she gets out. She smiles at him a little, shy, but she really means it. The food, the ride. She hasn't felt this good in a long time.

Ressling just stares at her in a way she can't interpret, and that's fine. She closes the door and offers him another small smile through the open window.

"Hey, kid," he says. Taylor turns around, surprised. Waiting. For a long moment, he doesn't say anything, just looks at her. And he looks, and keeps looking, burdened with this thing he's not sure he should say. Finally, he heaves a sigh, resigned. "Try not to fight it."

She frowns at him in open confusion. "Try not to fight what?"

But then he's starting the engine, and pulling away, and she stares after him, wondering what he's talking about, wondering about the look of guilt on his face.

She feels unsettled by this comment, but she's so tired now that she can't be bothered to dwell on it.

The earlier heat of the day, unbearable as it was, has since abated, and she is cocooned now in the heady, honey-colored warmth of dusk as the night makes it languid approach. She walks slowly along the sidewalk, thinking about the way Mr. J's bare hands had felt on her skin as fireflies light up alongside her, blinking hello, yellow and unhurried, like they have all the time in the world to flicker and play.

The salve on her skin is cool and soothing and she thinks she might even be able to sleep on her back tonight.

She looks up in time to see two boys walking in the opposite direction, on the sidewalk on the other side of the street. She does a double take because she thinks one of them looks familiar, but she can't place from where. It's really too dark to tell anyway. She knows one of Nathan's friends used to live on this street, but she hasn't seen him in so long, she's not even sure if he still lives here. She sees them eyeing her, and she walks a little faster just to be safe. She's almost home.

She reaches the end of the sidewalk, and then it's only a matter of cutting through a small strip of woods and through the lot of an abandoned Sunoco station to reach her own neighborhood.

Her sneakers crunch through the worn-down path of leaves and overgrown brush. It is a little darker here because of the canopy of trees crowded overhead. She passes the rusted, skeletal remains of a gutted car, with its insides torn out, car parts strewn all around, in varying states of death and decay and rebirth as they are repurposed into food for the soil, or permanent fixtures for the moss to overtake. She goes out of her way to jump over an old tire, and when she lands in the brush on the other side, she startles at the sound of something darting across the path. She whips her head around to see what it is, and she has to laugh that it's only a baby bunny, no bigger than her palm, all brown and soft and wide-eyed.

She relaxes, and then she is crouching on the ground and cooing at it, puts down her paper bag and splays out her hands and tries to coax it towards her, but it's wary, and after a moment it darts off in the opposite direction from which it had come.

She is still thinking about it and smiling to herself as she steps out of the woods and into the old Sunoco station, where weeds have fought their way through the spider-webbed cracks in the concrete and now climb haphazardly over the gas pumps, where the Quik Mart is draped in layers upon layers of kudzu, where the vines and overgrowth have molded itself along nearly every available inch of space. The windows are all heavily boarded, marred with an explosion of graffiti, everyone hungry to shout foul words to the world, to leave behind their signature in a series of fat, bubbly letters.

Taylor doesn't like it here. She knows there were some homeless people used to squat inside the Quik Mart at one time, before someone came down and shooed them out because the structure was unsound, and now it's boarded up so securely that no one can break inside.

But she knows kids from school hang out here sometimes at night, too. Their leftover beer bottles are evidence of that, baking beneath the heat of the sun during the day, growing microcosms inside themselves during the night. There's a cylindrical metal canister where everyone congregates around burned trash. The concrete is littered with the leftover remains of their cigarette butts, ash from their bonfires, crushed beer cans, and black skid-marks from their cars.

There's an ice machine turned over on its side, the kind where you can get two bags of ice for three dollars, empty, now, the doors hanging wide open, helpless, like a safe that's been ransacked and then left behind. The concrete near the side of the building is lighter in color than the rest, where old vending machines and newspaper dispensers used to reside. You used to be able to find forgotten or lost coins there, hiding in the cracks between the concrete and the wall, but they've since been scavenged.

She thinks about the bunny rabbit as she cuts across the empty lot, and how nice it would have been if she could have held it, or taken it home. She'd never had a pet before, not even a cat. She'd never really had anything to call her own, something to take care of, something that depended on her for its survival, and she wonders what that would feel like.

That's when she is blinded by the sudden onslaught of headlights.

She nearly jumps out of her own skin in her surprise, but then she is trapped, immobilized, caught in the heat of those hot, yellow beams, and all she can do is squint against the light as her heart throbs against her ribcage. Never has the saying "like a deer caught in the headlights" been more accurate than it is now. This is exactly how that must feel.

Her mind races for an answer, some sort of explanation as to how she could have been caught so off guard. She hadn't even noticed a parked car. How come she hadn't seen it? Or heard it? Did they have the engine off?

She hears the sound of loose rocks shifting against the concrete as someone steps towards her. She has to lift an arm to her eyes to keep the light from blinding her, and even then, she hears him before she sees him.

"Well, well, well. Been waiting for you all day."

Her heart stops, point blank.

She does the only thing she can think of.

She runs.

Since she's not about to run towards him, running back the way she came is her only option, and she thinks she has a good chance, if she can make it far enough. She's more likely to be spotted on that street than her own, overcrowded as it is, and if she can just make it through that small patch of woods, she'll be fine. Everything will be fine.

Her whole front side explodes in a world of pain.

She comes down hard on the concrete, tackled from behind by a body much bigger and much heavier than hers. She doesn't even have time to break her fall by putting her hands out in front of her, and her chin and the left side of her face takes the brunt of the impact, lighting her up with a pain she's never known.

"Holy shit, dude!" she hears someone say, a little farther away. "I thought you said she wouldn't try to fight."

"She won't," Nathan promises. He sounds far away, too, but that must just be the ringing in her ears, because she knows it's his familiar bulk on top of her, breathing down her neck, his hands all over her back, holding her down as he straddles her legs. "Stupid cunt is begging to be fucked." He leans down over her to whisper into her ear, so only she can hear. "Isn't that right?"

With the wind knocked out of her, she cannot reply, and she lies there on the concrete, gasping for air that will not come as the side of her face throbs and burns.

Nathan doesn't waste any time. He lifts the upper half of her body off the ground, dragging her across the concrete to the car. She is helpless to stop him, barely conscious of the blood on the ground, or on her face, dripping hot and slow down her neck. She tastes pools of cooper inside her mouth, too, warm and sour, and thinks that maybe she chipped a tooth, or busted her lip.

When her breath does return, she sobs in a mixture of pain and fear, and then she is thrashing her legs, trying to break free. The car is parked beneath the overhead metal awning that shades the gas pumps, and Nathan holds her still with his forearm slung around her throat as he opens the back door to his car with the other. Then his hands are on her, shoving her into the backseat, and she screams when the door opposite her opens as well, revealing someone older, someone she doesn't recognize.

He reaches for her underarms, pulling her further into the backseat, and she thrashes and kicks and feels her heart slamming against her chest so hard that it hurts.

"STOP! Stop, please!"

She screams again when Nathan flips her over onto her front, so that she's lying on her belly, and then she hears another voice from the front seat, looks up to see one of Nathan's friends, grinning maliciously, kneeling over the center console.  _How many of them are there_? she panics. She knows she's seen him before at school, knows that he used to be on the wrestling team with Nathan before he was expelled for beating up his ex-girlfriend.

Her heart drops into the pit of her stomach when she sees that he's wielding a cell phone. "God, she looks fucked up," he says, his eyes glassy and dark. She thinks his name is Caleb. She watches him lick his lips as he watches her from the lens of his phone.

The man she doesn't recognize, the one in front of her, wipes the blood from her face with the palm of his hand, as if that will do the trick. Then he grips her hair and brings his face down to hers. "You are pretty, aren't you?"

She stares into his eyes, and all she sees is abject pleasure. No remorse, no guilt, just hunger so perverse and so filthy and so  _wrong_ that she wants to curl up into a ball and be buried that way, beneath thousands of layers of earth, so that she is never seen by anyone in the world ever again, so that no one can ever look at her with those eyes, or with that intent.

She feels Nathan moving around behind her, straddling the backs of her thighs. "She's a fucking cunt is what she is. Finally going to fuck you like you deserve," he says, and she can hear him working at his belt, and then the zipper to his jeans. "Gonna fucking ruin you."

Taylor sobs and claws at the seats, but there is nowhere to go. "Please, please don't do this," she sobs, "I'll do anything."

"You will do anything," Nathan promises. "You'll do this."

She hears the elastic snap of boxer shorts, the rattling of his belt buckle against his thighs. She thrashes with renewed strength when his hands begin working on her own shorts, and the man in front of her has to pin her arms down, hold them behind her back so that Nathan can shimmy her shorts down her thighs.

She cries when her underwear is yanked down her thighs as well, and then she's just there, exposed, and everyone around her is foaming at the mouth and touching her all over. Nathan's hands are on the back of her thighs, and her ass, and someone else runs their fingers somewhere even she's never touched, and she just cries, open-mouthed, against the leather seat and drools blood and wishes she was never born, and thinks  _why?_   _Why me? What did I do to deserve this?_

"Take off her shirt," Caleb says, and the other man begins working it up, and her heart jumps up and clogs her throat because if they take off her shirt they'll see the 'J' there, and no one can see that. No one is supposed to know, but he's already rucking it up her back, all the way to her neck, exposing everything, and it's too late.

"Holy shit, what the fuck is that?"

She's not sure who says it. It doesn't matter. But she hears Nathan let out a breath behind her, and then he's leaning over her to look at it.

"Fucking sick, who did that to her?" Caleb wonders. "I thought you said she was a virgin."

Taylor waits with bated breath. It's Nathan's appraisal she is most fearful of. What will he think? What if he  _tells_ someone? What if he makes her say who did it? What will she say?

"You really are a fucking slut, aren't you?" he finally says. He slaps her on the ass so hard that she cries out, and it stings after. One of them laughs. "You've already been  _fucked_ , haven't you? That's what this is, isn't it?"

Taylor can't answer because she can't breathe. She tries to open her mouth, not even sure what she would say if she could speak, but no sound comes out.

"Fucking disgusting," he goes on. She can feel his fingers prodding between her legs, and it hurts, and she tries to pinch her thighs closer together, but he forces a knee between them so she can't, and it's over after that. She has never felt so exposed, so violated. "Guess I'll have to fuck your ass instead."

Her eyes widen, and she screams. "NO!"

She can hear Nathan behind her preparing himself, spitting into his palm, and then rubbing it along the length of himself.

"Please, please don't do this!"

Then he's pushing inside her, and she screams around the blood in her mouth. She screams, and the whole time she clenches down and writhes so hard that it takes both of them to hold her down, and she doesn't stop fighting, even when it feels like she's being split in two, like she's tearing from the inside out. She can hear Caleb palming himself in one hand while he films with the other, and she wants to die. She just wants to die.

"Fuuuck," Nathan groans. "Fucking tight, yeah." He shoves himself further in with a brutal thrust that makes her lurch forward. The leather seats are sweaty beneath her from her struggling, and her skin pulls against the leather, but it is a dull sensation compared to having Nathan inside her. He puts his hands on her hips and his fingers claw into the 'J', and she she cries until her eyes are blurry and she can't see, and she cries until her throat is raw and hoarse, and she cries until she can't cry anymore, and when it goes on for so long that she no longer has the energy to fight, she goes limp beneath the hands holding her down, letting Nathan fuck her, letting the other man palm at her breasts, letting Caleb film the whole thing.

_Hey kid… try not to fight it._

Taylor freezes at the memory of Ressling's words, goosebumps prickling over her skin. Had he _known_? Was this all part of the plan? Had Mr. J wanted this to happen all along? Had he orchestrated all of this?

"Yeah, you fucking like this, don't you, bitch? Feel my big cock inside of you. Fuckin' knew you'd be tight. Slut."

She closes her eyes, and she tries to think about something else, anything else, but his words keep pulling her back, and all she can feel is the slick between her thighs, all that blood, and her insides being torn apart, and hands all over her that she doesn't want, and the pain is excruciating, and she feels like she won't ever be able to walk again.

And when Nathan finishes, when she finally thinks it's over, they all switch places, and she realizes it won't be over until everyone's had a turn. Until everyone's had multiple turns.

She lays her head against the leather seat, thinks about Mr. J, and cries.

She cries.

* * *

She barely remembers limping home in the dark, or tonguing at her busted upper lip, or the left side of her face, open and raw from being shoved to the ground. Her banged up knees and elbows. She barely remembers getting into the shower, or washing off all the blood and dried come between her thighs, or biting down on her knuckles again to keep from screaming because it hurts to stand, but it hurts even worse to sit.

What she does remember is lying under the covers, her eyes burning with fat, unshed tears. She remembers thinking that she hates this stupid family. She hates Nathan and Meredith and Evelyn. Hates Evelyn's oblivion, hates Meredith for knowing the abuse that Nathan subjects her to and for doing nothing about it. And she especially hates Nathan, all the way to his core, to the very essence of his being. Hates his hands on her, the way he talks to her, and looks at her, and the way he makes her feel, like she's subhuman, like she really is just a hole to be fucked.

She just  _hates_. She hates, hates, hates, with an intensity that startles her.

She hates. And she can't sleep.

* * *

She leaves the house early the next morning. It takes all of her strength to get dressed, to even get out of bed, and it takes her the better part of the morning and afternoon to walk across town, to the warehouse. She wishes she had money to take the bus, but her bus pass expired in June, right after school let out, and Evelyn didn't see the purpose in renewing her pass for summertime use. So she walks, and walks, and it's at a glacial pace, and sometimes she has to stop to lean against the side of a building to rest or to give herself a pep talk, to brace herself against the pain, but in the end she makes it at last, and when she finds that Mr. J isn't there, she sits on the couch and tries to find a position that isn't agonizing, and she waits.

She waits, and she thinks about last night, and then tries not to think about last night, and she thinks about what she's going to say to Mr. J and how he's going to react, and she thinks until her head is pounding, and even then she can't stop.

It must be late afternoon when he finally returns, and somewhere in the back of her mind she finds she is relieved that his face is bare of greasepaint, and that he's not wearing his purple suit. He's more approachable like this. It will be easier to tell him this way, when his eyes look more like the color of chocolate instead of the color of night.

He raises his brows when he sees her, but doesn't look surprised.

He stands over her and says, "What happened to your face?" And Taylor, sitting on the couch, bows her head into her hands and bursts into tears.

And it takes him a moment, but he kneels in front of her so they're eye level, occupying the space between her thighs, and he looks very serious when he asks her what happened.

She meets his gaze, but can barely see him through her blur of tears. "Did you know?"

"Know wha- _t_ ," he says. She's learned that he starts enunciating his consonants—especially the  _T_ 's—when he's irritated or impatient, his tongue hitting hard against the roof his mouth.

"Please don't lie to me," she says, soft, pleading.

He works his mouth, irritated, and she bites her lips and breathes hard through her nose. Tries not to cry.

"Nathan, last night—" It hurts just to say his name, and speaking it aloud only recalls the memory of last night in startling detail. She sniffles and tries again. "He hurt me," she says, because she can't say the other word, the  _R_  word. It's too sordid. Too disgusting. "And I just need to know if you knew. If you planned this," she says, her words coming out in a tangled, panicked rush. "Please tell me the truth. Please. I need to know."

He stares at her, his eyes narrowed, calculating, and she withers under his gaze. Can't tell what he's thinking. "Tell. Me. What. He. Did."

Taylor's shoulders sag beneath the weight of his command. She closes her eyes. Hangs her head. "He raped me," she says, so quietly that he has to lean forward to hear her. "Last night, after I left here, he—he said he had been waiting for me. And his friends were there, and…. " she trails off, unable to finish, and when she looks up again she is not sure how to interpret the fire in his eyes.

"Why—" he rolls his neck a little bit, looks up to the ceiling for a second, and her insides shrivel, because she knows he's angry, and she can tell from the tightness in his shoulders that he could snap at any moment, "—why would you ask if I  _knew_?"

The way he lays his eyes into hers makes her feel like she's been throttled. She swallows, feels her heartbeat throbbing in her ears. Her voice shakes when she answers, and she explains to him how Ressling had dropped her off not at home, but in an adjoining neighborhood, and what his parting words were to her after she got out.

"I just thought…. " she trails off, knowing that he's already filled in the blanks.

"I  _told_ you, I only let it go as far as I  _allowed_  it to."

Taylor frowns, remembering that night on the bridge, and relief washes through her. He didn't know. He didn't plan this.

"I'm just—" She closes her eyes, feels the burn of tears behind her lids. "I'm so  _angry_ ," she says, like she's ashamed of this, or that it pains her to say it, to admit to this truth that they both knew would eventually come.

"Yes," he says, eager, and he leans forward, the aftermath of fire burning in his eyes, all hot smoke and ashes. "What do you want to do about it?"

She looks at him. And she knows.

She tells him that Nathan is going away next weekend, that he has a wrestling competition in Nevada, and that she's ready, and she wants to do it there, and Mr. J smiles at her in a way that make her insides light up, that makes her toes curl inside her shoes, that makes the hair on her arms stand on end like they've been struck with an electric current.

"Well," he says, "it looks like you and I are going on a road trip."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *This chapter contains the following warnings: Foul/offensive/sexist language, rape of a minor, and graphic depictions of violence.
> 
> As excited as I was to post this chapter, the writing process—particularly the end—was excruciating. I agonized for weeks over how I would depict the scene between Taylor and Nathan. I knew from the beginning this moment would be important to describe in a certain level of detail (rather than to just say that it happened and then move on) because it's a pivotal moment for Taylor and depicts a major turning point for her: that is, the decision she makes with the Joker at the end of this chapter, that she is finally ready to take revenge on Nathan. But I also knew I didn't want the scene to feel exploitative, or grisly to the point where people just didn't want to read it, so I hope I accomplished that. Not a lot of things I have written have made me squirm, but this definitely did. It was hard to keep my heart from racing, which is exactly what it did for the duration of the time I was writing it. It was painstaking effort, taking several hours and the better part of my day, but I didn't stop because I knew I didn't want to lose the momentum I had created.
> 
> I'm quite insecure about this chapter as a whole. I feel like it's not as evocative as the previous chapters, and my writing isn't quite up to par, but I hope that it still resonates with you all the same.
> 
> Mostly I hope you will want to keep reading after what has transpired. Part V will be the final installment. A couple more warnings to come, so if this isn't your cup of tea, here might be a good place to stop. Thank you for being with me on this journey. Your comments are so appreciated.


	5. Chapter 5

_I could wish for something softer_

_but you know me._

_I love a tragedy._

_I love when it's urgent._

— _Caitlyn Siehl,_ _Daydream_

**Part V**

_**Finale** _

He lets her stay the night.

He makes her think that he doesn't want her to, that it interferes with some other previously laid plans—that she is ruining something important. Makes her plead and cry and wring her hands. She's so _pretty_  when she begs, after all, and that's why he makes her do it. Tears well in her eyes, such is the force of her desperation—her need to be with him—and it fills him with such a sense of raw satisfaction that it lights up every single nerve, so that he is thrumming with pleasure, hot with it. He has to work to feign indifference, dim the fire behind his eyes. He is crouched on her level, where she still sits on the couch, and his gaze darkens as she scoots towards him to be closer. He can tell she wants to reach out to him, lay her hands on his arms, touch him in some way, but she hesitates, and her hands fall back into her lap.

"Please, Mr. J.  _Please_."

And oh, her little lip quiver, how can he say no?

He stands, takes several calculated steps away, like he has to mull over this decision—whether he'll allow her to stay, or send her back home to the big bad wolf. She waits and antagonizes and bites her lip. He thinks about how important it is to put distance between them in moments like this, how it's essential to make her go out of her way to initiate contact between them—make her want it,  _need_  it—this visceral throb, the aching tug and pull on all her little tender heartstrings. His own heart pounds when he thinks about it, this game he's playing, all the calculated movements of his pieces across this elaborate chess board of his own design.

He turns around to look at her, spins on his heel slowly, drawing out this moment for as long as he can. He sees her gripping the edges of the couch with the sort of force that leaves her knuckles shiny and white.

"You can stay," he allows, like he's reluctant to say it, like he's relenting, like he didn't know from the moment she arrived that she would be spending the night here, with him. Like this wasn't exactly what he had intended.

Taylor exhales in something that isn't quite relief but is close enough, this great weight momentarily lifted from her shoulders. He can see in her eyes the feverish throbbing of her heartbeat. It takes a moment for her anxiety to fade back into the recesses from which it had come, for her to breathe normally again.

"Mr. J," she says, so tenderly—and he relishes in the way she always says his name, the way she cradles the consonants inside her mouth, like it's something she can taste—"it—it hurts so much," she whimpers, wanting some form of validation from him, acknowledgement, sympathy. As if he could actually give her those things.

"What does, sweet pea?"

Her frown deepens, like she wasn't expecting him to ask her this, to not know what she's talking about. And of course he knows. But he delights in hearing her voice her discomfort, in hearing her give voice to the nasty, grotesque things she's too embarrassed to say. Something enchanting in watching her mouth form and take on the shape of such foul words, words that she'd blush to say, even if whispered in the safety and oblivion of the dark.

" _Everything_ hurts," she sobs. Her answer is a cop-out. They both know this. They both know what hurts, this thing that is too taboo to say.

She sniffles, wraps her arms around her sides in a self-administered hug. Perhaps she wishes it was his arms around her instead—and when she looks up at him and meets his gaze, he knows this is true. He doesn't take his eyes off her as he reaches inside his jacket for a cell phone, a burner, which he tosses into her lap.

"Call her," he orders.

She looks at it as if she's never used a phone before. But she doesn't have to ask to know he's talking about Evelyn. She wipes the snot from her nose with the back of her hand and sniffles.

"What should I say?"

"Tell her you're staying a friend's house. Someone from school."

Her cheeks turn warm. "I don't have any friends from school," she says. He knows it bothers her to have to say this, too conscious of how this portrayal depicts her in his eyes, like she's a loser, an outcast. A  _freak_.

He leans forward, slight, just enough to intimidate her into doing exactly as he says. "Then make someone u _p_ ," he says. He knows she can see the irritation in the way he works his mouth, the slight tilt of his head.

She nods, both over-eager and apologetic, and he steps away, feigns as if he has something else to do, but really he is watching her from the corner of his eye as her thumb trembles over the appropriate numbers. He listens intently from across the room when she says " _Evelyn_?", listens to her explain she's having a sleepover. Emma. Emma Robinson.  _I don't know that girl_ , he can imagine on the other line, and Taylor wets her lips and falters.

"She's new. She just moved here, I—she's in my math class." A beat. "It's just a sleepover… please?" More weighted silence, and then Taylor heaving a visible sigh of relief, uttering thank you.

She hangs up the phone, and the Joker raises his brows when she looks up and meets his expectant gaze. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"

He watches her bite her bottom lip. "I'm not a very good liar," she admits, like this too embarrasses her.

He grins as he stalks towards her. "Of course you're not. You're too  _sweet_  to tell a convincing lie. You just need a little practice." He kneels in front of her, on his haunches, all business, and she watches him with rapt attention, which pleases him. "It's all in the  _eyes_ ," he says, "in the things you don't say. You have to look the other person, right here," he says, gesturing to his own eyes, hunching closer, crowding into her space, "and you have to look at them and you have to not look away. One blink, one little glance in another direction, even if it's just for a second, and they'll know.  _Liar_ ,  _liar, pants on fire_ ," he sing-songs. "People will see right  _through_ you."

"People like you?"

Her question surprises as much as it delights him. He never does know exactly what she's going to say. For a moment, he doesn't say anything in reply, and then his mouth splits into a grin, and he cuffs her on the cheek.

"People like me," he agrees. "But you'd  _never_ lie to your Mr. J, would you? Not my girl."

Taylor swallows and then shakes her head. "I'd never lie to you," she agrees, eyes full of open promise.

"Hm," he says, tilting his head back, eyeing her from over the bridge of his nose, like he doesn't believe her. "Pinky swear?"

Taylor bites her lip and can't help but crack a smile, the first of the day. She curls her pinky finger around his own proffered digit and meets his eyes. Her cheeks flush at the skin-to-skin contact, and he thinks,  _so easy_  at the same time she says, "Pinky swear."

"That's my good girl," he says, affectionate. Ruffles her hair. Stands. "'Cause I'd know if you did. And liars have to be  _punished_."

Taylor swallows—afraid, suddenly—and the Joker turns away, so she won't see his smirk, knowing that she'd take any punishment he doled upon her. Knowing that, when this is all over, she'll be sick—feverish—with the need to be punished, that he'll having her begging for it.

He pulls out his pocket watch to check the time, twirls it once on its chain before tucking it back into his slacks.

"I'm glad we had this talk."

* * *

She wakes to a wet circle of drool beneath her cheek, and the careful shades of dawn, all the early, fragile grays of it. And the greasy orange couch, the one that smells like the pried open maw of gasoline and old sweat, the one he'd bent her over when he'd held her down and branded her, transcribed himself forever in a secret place only she would see. Of course, now she's not the only one who has ever laid eyes on it.

_Fucking sick, who did that to her?_

She thinks about how they could be watching the video of her right now, huddled around each other, laughing, or how they all probably have their own copies on their cell phones. Maybe they're palming themselves right now, jerking off, thinking of all the things they wished they would have done that there wasn't time for. She wonders if they posted it online, if Nathan's shown it to friends from school, if it's making the rounds, if she'll return to school in the fall and everyone will be muttering "slut" under their breath when she walks past. She wonders if a teacher will accidentally see it—the 'J', too—and suddenly she'll have to try and explain where it came from, who did that to her. And then maybe the police will get involved, and they'll know, somehow they'll  _know_  it's Mr. J, and they'll take him away from her and she won't ever see him again, and then she'll be alone all over again, forever, and she can't go through that again, she can't. She  _won't._

She presses her fingers to her eyes and tries not to think about it, tasting that sharp burn of bile crawling up her throat. Swallowing it back down.  _That's it, good girl,_  Mr. J would praise.

She doesn't remember falling asleep, doesn't remember pulling a blanket over her, or having taken her shoes off, but when she wakes up that is exactly what she finds, and she flushes at the thought of Mr. J having done these things for her, at having removed her shoes, leaving them on the floor beside the couch, or having tucked a blanket over her to make sure she doesn't get cold. She thinks she remembers the phantom pressure of fingertips on her face, someone tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, but perhaps she had dreamt it, like the way you do when you want something so, so badly, something you hadn't even put a name to. Hadn't he given her something to help her sleep as well, a pill, or something, or some funny-tasting water?

She sits up and sways for a moment, her head both heavy and light, like it's stuffed full of cotton. The inside of her mouth tastes foul when she runs her tongue along her bottom row of teeth. She wants something to drink. She has to pee. Her neck is sore.

Other places are sore, too.

She gingerly peels back the blanket and stands, and when she does she is awarded with a fresh wave of pain that nearly makes her keel over. Her insides burn. It feels raw. Used. It's a pain so foreign and new to her that she struggles to process it. There is no position that alleviates her discomfort. It hurts to stand. It hurts to sit. It hurts to walk. It hurts to do nothing at all, and that is a manic sort of pain.

She limps to the bathroom. Shuts the door. She sits on the toilet and it spreads her open in a way she hadn't anticipated, and she grits her teeth and tries not to cry, gasping with the exertion of simply trying to hold herself in that position so that she can finish. Her thighs tremble with it, taut from the strain.

She zips up her shorts afterwards and washes her hands, splashes her face and rinses her mouth with lukewarm water that tastes brown, like pennies. She stares at herself in the square, cloudy sheet of mirror, something that someone slapped on the wall above the sink in a hurry. There's dried blood and a scab forming above her upper lip and on her chin, and a nasty looking red scrape down the whole left side of her face, like a really bad rug burn.

She feels ugly. Disgusting.

_Worthless cunt. Hole to be fucked._

When she goes to him, finding him tucked away in his office, her face is blotchy with tear tracks, hastily wiped, and her eyelashes are wet. She stands obediently in the doorway and waits for his attention.

He doesn't immediately turn to look at her, which bothers her a little, but when he does spin in his chair, and lays the full weight of his gaze upon her, Taylor forgets her momentary annoyance and feels herself warming up from the inside out, suddenly hot under his full attention. She squirms in the doorway.

"Good mooorning, princess. Sleep well?"

She nods. She did sleep well, which surprises her. She knows—with much more certainty than before—that he must have given her something to aide her slumber, but she doesn't know what, or when. She barely remembers anything beyond coming here, begging him to let her stay. All she remembers is her fear, her pain—pain that ravages her now and makes it difficult to stand. She shifts her weight to her other foot and grimaces when she does.

"Here," he says, gesturing to the desk where there is a brown, paper bag, free of any logos or defining trademarks as to indicate its origins. "Eat."

She doesn't need to be told twice. She limps to the desk and peers inside the bag, retrieving some sort of grilled sandwich with fried egg, bacon, tomato, avocado, and cheese. She tastes the grill marks on the bread, and even though it's cold now, it melts in her mouth, and, for half a moment, she can almost forget how much she hurts.

Mr. J nudges a plastic cup in her direction, a Big Gulp with fruit punch or something, and Taylor picks it up with both hands and pops off the clear plastic lid and finishes it in one go. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand when she finishes, and when she looks up she realizes Mr. J's been staring at her the whole time, like she's a wild creature, like she's fascinating. It makes her face hot, his full attention. She shifts her weight again and presses her lips together.

"Th—thank you. For the food."

"Anything for my girl."

Taylor preens, bites her lip and stares at the floor. She loves when he calls her that.  _My girl_. When she looks up, she briefly meets his gaze—dark, unreadable—and her eyes drift to something familiar on the table behind him. She frowns and makes as if to step towards it.

"Is that—is that my yearbook?"

Meredith's, actually. She knows because she recognizes Meredith's name hastily scrawled in blue Sharpie along the spine. Taylor would flip through it sometimes when Meredith wasn't home, act out imaginary scenarios with imaginary friends, give the faces before her new identities and backstories and names. Pretend they were people she had never met. People that liked her, and wanted to be her friend.

Mr. J reaches behind him with one hand, snapping the book shut. The abruptness of the sound startles her, and she jumps a little.

He shoots her a grin that reads more like a snarl. A warning. "Just a little _research_ , pumpkin. Why don't you go lie down for a bit?"

She contemplates his suggesting. She  _is_  feeling tired, even though she just woke up. It almost feels like a drowsiness that is beyond her control, like she's fighting an instinct. She stares at the Big Gulp cup and wonders, then manages to tear her eyes away.

"But—but I want to stay here. With you." There is a touch of panic in her voice when she says it, and she hates that. She doesn't want to be sent away like some errant child. She doesn't want to be alone. Not right now. She wishes more than anything he would just beckon her closer, maybe pull her into some kind of embrace, even if it's malicious.  _Put your hands around my neck again_ , she thinks, wildly.  _Bend me over your knee_.  _Punish me._

God, please. She'd take anything.

She squirms in the doorway and gnaws on the inside of her cheek, wishing she could find some way to voice this feeling, this desperation that has so carefully sunk its teeth into her and will not let go. She knows it'd sound pathetic to him. Weak.

She doesn't know where this acute need for skin on skin comes from, but it's a need so feverish and hurried it blooms inside her like a cancer, metastasizing at an alarming rate. She just wants to be close to him. Enveloped.

She wishes, maybe, that he could swallow her whole so that she might just live inside him. She could slither down, over his palate, down the warmth of his throat, recede into his crevices, fill up the hollows of his insides, his lungs, make herself a home inside his organs and bones. She could bask in the heat of him from the inside. She'd be safe, there. Untouchable. Only his. It could be their little secret. No one had to know. She could slip out only when it is safe, only when she has to. A necessary regurgitation.

"Daddy is  _busy_ ," he says. She remembers the last time he said those same words to her, and it makes her anxiety coil somewhere low inside her, just far enough out of reach where she cannot grab ahold of it to snuff it out. He is not quite angry when he says it, but he is curt, and his voice doesn't leave any room for further debate. He looks at her in a way that warns her not to push, even though they both know she never does. She is a good girl. She listens. She obeys. He likes her better when she's compliant, doesn't he?

She lingers in the doorway for a little while longer, wringing her hands, hoping he'll change his mind, but he doesn't, and he turns away and ignores her, hunching over his work. Her legs start to quiver from the strain of standing for so long, in so much pain, and she does want to lie down, but maybe that's just the power of his suggestion.

She hobbles away, and he must think she isn't going to return because he either does not notice her when she does, or is choosing to ignore her. It doesn't matter either way, as long as she can be close to him. She fluffs up a greasy, ratty towel to use as a pillow, and then she gently lies down in the open doorway, draping the blanket from the couch over her, curling herself into the shape of an S, watching him, knowing this is as close as she can get, uninvited. She'll take it. She has to.

She drifts off to sleep much quicker than she imagines. She dreams that, as she's drifting off, Mr. J rolls back in his chair and crosses his arms over his stomach and watches her for a long time, sleeping there in the doorway.

Or maybe she doesn't dream that at all.

* * *

The Joker is finished mapping out the more tedious details of their trip. The motel, the transportation, the days leading up to the big event itself. It's a lot of work, but it's necessary work, and he does it all himself. Faster this way. Easier. No middle men.

Excitement ripples through him the closer they get. He knows their time together is close to reaching its climax, her metamorphosis almost fully complete. He knows she senses this too, the end of this little game. It's why she's been so clingy, so goddamn  _needy_.

He has her on a rope now—no longer just a string—and knows that she'll follow where he goes. She comes without even having to be pulled, and the synchronicity of this, the two of them, is truly a thing of beauty. Her desperate compliance—she will do anything for him. She loves him.

She fucking  _loves_  him.

He cranes his neck to look at her, asleep on the floor, her legs tangled up underneath her. Her hair fanned across her face and neck, all tangles and knots. And her lips parted, just slight. She looks younger than usual here. But laying down your defenses, softening the ever-present worried crease between the brow, it will have that effect on you.

He moves towards her, up and out of the chair as if drawn. And then he crouches down in front of her, resting on his haunches, studying her up close. He thinks about the evolution of their time together, this gentle push and pull, the careful threads of truth he wove. But the lies, too, which he spoon-fed to her, lies she couldn't get down fast enough, like the sweetest medicine, the kind that tasted like cotton candy, the kind that he knows little girls like her would have snuck greedily from the cupboard until she was sick from it. Puking up pink into the toilet bowl, praying for it to be over—the bargaining—thinking to God she'd never do anything like that again if the heaving would just finally stop.

He reaches up to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. She huffs a little in her sleep, but doesn't stir. His eyes are dark as they freely roam over her curled up form.

All the bargaining in the world couldn't save her now.

* * *

Taylor snaps awake to the sound of a door slamming. She sits up, her blanket falling from his shoulders, and has to take a moment to let her eyes adjust to the lack of light. For a moment, she's unsure of her surroundings, doesn't know where she is. Then she looks up and sees Mr. J's workspace, and she remembers. Relief washes over her in a wave that is cut short and crashes halfway before the crest.

Where is Mr. J?

She stands, and the pain is agonizing—a combination of sleeping on the hard floor and yesterday's events. She doesn't know if she'll ever not be sore. She doesn't even remember what it feels like to not be in pain.

She limps a couple of steps, back out into the open hangar, where the bluish hues of dusk have filtered through the open skylights.

"Mr. J?" Her voice is hoarse from sleep. She calls for him again, louder this time.

No answer.

Her heart scrambles. She runs, or tries to, shouting his name only to be greeted by the lingering echo of her own frantic voice. She flings open the door to the bathroom, but he is not there.

"Mr. J! Where are you?"

She feverishly scans the interior of the hangar, seeing him nowhere. Her heart clenches into a fist, and she quickly puts on her shoes and limps to the oversized, dirty plastic flaps that substitute as a makeshift door.

She thrusts them aside as she forces herself through, hearing them  _thwap_  back into place behind her. She exhales in relief when she sees him, phone pressed to his ear, back towards her. He turns around just as she comes to a crashing halt, rocks shifting in the gravel beneath her.

He says something into the phone she cannot hear, and then slips into his pocket.

"What's wrong, honey?" He cocks his head at her like he doesn't know.

"I just—I," she falters, feeling dizzy all the sudden from having gotten up so fast, the adrenaline rush over just as fast as it had begun. "I just woke up, and… I didn't know where you were." She looks away, sheepish, and doesn't see him smirk.

"It's getting late," he says, he squints up at the sky for a second, then comes towards her. "I think your sleepover with  _Emma_  has come to an end."

Taylor fumbles around the reply tangled in her throat. She considers begging him to let her stay,  _just one more night, please, please_. She wishes she had rehearsed an elaborate speech in her head, something to make him want to keep her longer. But she knows she has to go. Evelyn will be suspicious, and it looks bad if Taylor isn't there when the agency shows up for a random welfare check and Evelyn doesn't even know where she is.

Mr. J slips a handful of clean, pressed bills into her open palm, like the ones you get from the bank teller when you deposit a check. Evelyn used to talk about the fresh bills that would be delivered every so often, how the bank liked to exchange out the old ones for crisp, clean bills, the kind that had never been touched by human hands before, and how sometimes the bills were pressed so thin you had to lick your fingers to get two bills to separate. How all that money smelled so fresh and new, a curious mix of machine and linen.

She doesn't count the bills in front of him; she doesn't want him to think she's greedy. He sends her on her way to the nearest bus stop shortly after, and it's only once she's procured a seat in the back of the bus, near the window, that she pulls out the small wad and carefully counts them out on her lap.

" _This is all for me?"_

" _Knock yourself out, princess. Get whatever you need. Get something… nice."_

She knows she had blushed, like it was  _wrong_ to be given that much money, to spend on whatever she wanted.

Gotham passes in an industrial blur, silvers and grays and the fading hues of a city almost nearing sleep. She thinks about all the food she could buy with this much money, all the candy she could ever wish for, and her mouth waters at the idea of all that sugar, enough to make her teeth throb in want.

Taylor fingers the other item the Joker had given her. A banged up cell phone. It's another burner, something old, not like the cell phones kids at school have. There's only one number in the contacts, and the inbox is empty. He left her with strict instructions to only use it in case of an emergency. He had been very clear about that.  _"If you have to question whether it's an emergency… it probably isn't. Capiche?"_

It's a long bus ride back home. She falls asleep once or twice, her head nestled against the window, the vibrations of the glass numbing her skull. She forces herself to stay awake and sit upright after a while, the knobs of her spine digging into the hard seat. She doesn't want to miss her stop.

The bus graciously dumps her just outside of her street, so she doesn't have to walk far. Not like last time—even if every hair stands on end, just from the short walk from the sidewalk to the door. Her heart throbs as she climbs the three brick steps to the front door. She swallows and glances behind her. It's a small mercy, but Nathan's car isn't parked along the side of the street, in its usual spot, so she knows he's not home. Yet.

Meredith is still up, watching TV—Taylor can see her through the slats in the blinds in the bay window in the living room where she sits on the couch, her legs folded beneath her. Taylor watches the lights of the TV flicker across her features for a moment. Rings again. Meredith begrudgingly comes to the door after Taylor rings the doorbell for the fourth time to be let in. Meredith huffs and sighs when the door opens, acting as though it's the biggest hassle in the world to walk the short distance from the couch to the door.

She doesn't say anything in greeting as she lets Taylor in, only looks her up and down as her features crinkle into a look of disgust, as if she's just sucked on a very sour lemon.

"God, you  _stink_."

Taylor unconsciously folds her arms across her abdomen, hugging herself, as if that alone will prevent her stench from traveling any further. Meredith is usually an inch or two taller than her, but in her bare feet they're eye-level.

Her face heats in embarrassment, and she tries to explain. "I was outside all day, it was hot and—"

"Whatever. Just don't stink up my room, okay?"

Meredith flops back onto couch, and Taylor stands in the doorway and bites her lip and can't think of anything to say. She tiptoes up the staircase as quietly as she can and locks the bathroom door. She strips off her clothes and takes a cold shower to wash off the day. When she is standing in front of the mirror afterwards, with a towel wrapped under her arm, she thoroughly brushes her teeth and rinses with mouthwash. Watches blue spit spiral down the drain. And then she is staring at the pill bottle she'd hid inside the small vanity behind the mirror, a house for old junk that nobody ever uses. Cotton balls. Vapor rub. Moldy Q-tips. A nail file and a brown, crusty bottle of hydrogen peroxide, well past is expiration date.

She pours a handful of small, oval-shaped pills into her hand. Mr. J hadn't told her how many to take, so she swallows three and cups some sink water between her hands to help get them down and hopes that's enough.

The bathroom door croaks when it opens and the bottom drags against the frayed carpet in a way that makes Taylor have to shove her weight against it to get it to open all the way. She looks both ways in the hallway before darting the short distance to her and Meredith's shared room, closing the door behind her. She has to lean up against it and close her eyes after she does, will her heart to stop slamming against her ribcage.

 _It's fine. Everything will be okay_ , she tells herself. Meredith is here. Nathan's never tried anything with Meredith in the next bed over. Nathan is a lot of things, but he isn't a complete idiot.

Not that it matters if he did try something with Meredith sleeping in the next bed—Meredith already knows about the two of them. Maybe she wouldn't even try to stop him if he did come into her room.

Maybe she'd watch? Maybe she'd hear him groaning, the sound of skin slapping skin, and she'd flip on the light to investigate. Maybe Nathan would ruck up Taylor's shirt and say, "Hey, Mer, come take a look at this," and show her the brand on her hip, and then they'd both tell her what a slut she was, and they could laugh about it.

Taylor limps to her bed and hides her money underneath the mattress and then crawls beneath the covers. It's sticky hot—humid—but she pulls the covers over her head anyway and tries not to think of the places where she throbs.

* * *

Taylor is late.

The Joker drums long, spidery fingers against the steering wheel, impatient. He knows something must have come up to prevent her from arriving at their predetermined destination on time, but he also knows whatever it is, it isn't an emergency. He gave her the burner for that.

She shows up only a few minutes later, hauling a backpack. It bounces behind her as she jogs to the car. She smiles shyly at him as she slides into the passenger seat of the rusted 1989 Plymouth Reliant he just slapped brand new sparkly tags on, belonging to one John Smith. Both the car and the title are generic. Unmemorable. Neither will raise any red flags, when all this is said and done.

"Mr. J," she says, a little breathless. She must have run all the way here. Her eyes rake over him in an appraisal of both amazement and surprise. "You look so… different."

He smirks. He supposes he does. He's dressed for what the occasion calls for—tourist attire—an ensemble that consists of a Hawaiian shirt, cargo shorts, flip flops, a baseball cap, and dark sunglasses.

He studies her in a similar fashion, behind the inscrutable gaze his sunglasses cast, but he does not readily give her the satisfaction of commenting on what she is wearing, even as she preens and readies herself under his gaze, biting her lip, so hungry for his approval, for a fleeting compliment. He doesn't have to ask if the dress is new. Paisley and eggshell blue. Her shoes, too, little white sandals he's never seen before. And… a bra. Definitely a bra. He doesn't linger on that, even if he does wonder what else she bought with the money he gave her. Her hair is done up in pigtails. She looks girlish.  _Cute_.

All this for him. Even  _Batman_  has never gone this far out of his way to impress him.

"What took you so long?" he asks, stringing out the words. He hasn't started the engine yet. Taylor sets her bag down in the backseat. Turns to look at him.

"Meredith was suspicious," she says, still a little breathless. "I had to go to the library. I printed this."

She hands him a piece of paper which he snatches from her and unfolds it.

"I made it," she goes on, "to show Meredith. She wouldn't stop talking about how she hadn't heard of a summer school trip to Washington D.C., and Evelyn was starting to get suspicious too, so I made a permission slip. I just copy and pasted the school logo from the website, and…" she trails off. He sees Evelyn's sloppy, piggish signature at the bottom. But he has to give it to her—despite the misspelling of the word 'opportunity', it does look fairly official. "I hope you're not mad," Taylor continues, unsure of how to interpret his expression. "I made sure the ladies at the library didn't see what I was doing." When he doesn't say anything, she goes on. "Meredith shut up after that. I think she was just jealous she didn't get to go on a school trip, too…."

The Joker hums. He  _could_  berate her, tell her it was an idiotic thing to do—it put their whole operation at risk, after all—but Taylor's little clusterfuck of a surrogate family bought it, and that's all that matters. Plus, he doesn't want to spoil the mood.

He reaches for one of her pigtails instead, loops it around his finger and tugs, moving towards her at the same time he pulls her towards him, both of them leaning over the center console, their foreheads so close they're almost touching.

"Let's get this show on the road, hm?"

Taylor grins at him, and her eyes sparkle, all glossy and green. When he pulls back, the bloodrush that follows makes him have to shift in his seat.

He eats that shit up.

* * *

They cover a lot of ground on that first day. Taylor spends most of it in a fascinated trance, watching the world pass by in a blur of colors she's never seen before. She's never been outside of Gotham, she tells him, not once. And, well, he's  _honored_  to be her first, he says, and of course the way he says it makes her blush. After a while, the allure of the I-80 West wears off, as does the passing scenery and cars. She talks for a long time, about nothing, about everything. He stores all of it, for some reason. And when she's done, she tinkers with the radio after a while, and he graciously lets her.

"I don't really know what kind of music I like. What kind of music do you like?" She barrels on without waiting for an answer. "Maybe you don't really listen to music." She is still flipping through stations. "Ooh, I like this song!" She turns the volume up, something bluesy and twangy and soulful, and then turns her head to gauge his reaction, to see whether he approves. He reveals nothing, and Taylor is content to settle on that station, which proudly announces an array of the  _70s, 80s, and Today._ She lapses into silence, and then after a while falls in and out of sleep.

They stop for bathroom breaks. They stop to eat, and to put gas in the car. It's monotonous, or at least it should be, but she doesn't complain, not once. It's the most time she's ever spent with him at one time, and he knows she is enjoying every second of it. She smiles over at him from time to time, in that shy, lovesick puppy kind of way, just happy to be here, with him. It should sicken him. It doesn't.

He drives twelve hours on the first day, and sixteen on the second. They sleep in the car on both nights. On the second night, she curls up in the backseat and uses one of his jackets as a blanket. He reclines his seat back as far as it will go and sleeps on his back. Wakes in the middle of the night to the sound of her soft breathing, and turns his head to watch the steady rise and fall of her chest in the dark, fascinated for reasons he can't quite understand. The moon slides its long, pale fingers into the interiors of the car, smoothing over her skin in ripples, turning it milk white and soft. There's a swamp behind the convenience store where they're parked in the back, where bullfrogs croak, boarish and loud. They're shrouded beneath a heavy canopy of pines, sticky and leaking with sap he can smell. He closes his eyes, slips back into the weary hands of exhaustion, and sleeps.

He starts the car when the sky is the shade of gunmetal. It must have rained during the night, but the heat of the day is already coming into full swing, and steam rises from the pavement like a fog. Taylor is still asleep in the backseat. He doesn't wake her, sliding his eyes up into the rearview mirror so he can glance at her from time to time as he drives. He sees her eyelashes fluttering, still closed, and knows she's dreaming. He wonders what she dreams about. If she dreams of him. If she fantasizes about happily-ever-afters and tender domesticities, or if she dreams of something crueler and parlous, like all the times he's hurt her, his hands around her neck, not-so-distant memories of being bent over the couch, so shameful, the searing metal of his first initial pressed to her hip till it scarred. Or maybe something neither tender nor rough, just the two of them, just sex; he knows she thinks about him like that—he planted that seed early on, in the beginning, when this was just getting started. He knows she fantasizes about how good it feels to be wanted. Desired. To be  _loved_. His touch, and skin on skin, all of their shared sharp edges, things that are warm and wet, the bite of bone, a hundred different carnalities involving just the two of them. How he warped affection and physical touch, so that she'd want it from him—need it—even if it hurt, even if it scarred.

She wakes sometime midmorning, the sun hot and bright outside the car, slamming into them from all sides, just it and them and nothing but miles and miles of cracked pavement. She yawns, long and hard, and huffs out a little sound afterwards.

"Was I asleep for a long time?" she asks, sheepish, as if knowing he had watched her this whole time.

"A while," he says, and she is content with this and with sitting in the backseat, staring at the hazy mirages that have gathered over the desert mountaintops in the distance. He stops so she can use the bathroom a little while later, and then they're back on the road, and a couple of tedious hours pass in relative silence. He thinks she is worn out from being cooped up in the car for three days. He doesn't push. He knows as they get closer, she is starting to think about what is to come, starting to remember that this isn't just some fun little road trip. He can see it in the careful slant of her eyes, that gentle furrow between her brows, a look of contemplation, excitement, and beneath all that, fear, the strongest undercurrent of all.

She doesn't ask him any questions about it. About the plan, the plan they have not yet discussed. He thinks she's afraid to, like if she gives voice to it, suddenly it becomes something real and no longer just imagined. But it's okay. He'll wait for her to broach the subject when she's ready. Better for her to push than him. He has to be careful now, scrupulous about gently nudging her in the right direction. He has to make her feel as if she's gotten there all on her own.

She takes another nap in the backseat, and he realizes all those sedatives he's been feeding her over the past couple of days are probably taking a toll on her system; he makes a mental note to adjust the dosage. After a while, she wakes and crawls clumsily back into the front seat, limbs all askew, and then huffs a sigh once she's seated.

For a while, he catches her staring at herself in the passenger side mirror. The windows are down, giving her unmarred access to her own reflection. The loose tendrils from her French braid, the ones near her scalp, almost white from the exposure to sunlight, whip around her face in the hot wind. He glances at her from the corner of his eye, sees how intensely she is studying herself just now, unblinking, hard, angry. He thinks about how unnatural it is to look at someone looking at themselves in a mirror, how it feels like you've stolen from them this secret moment not meant for your eyes. But of course this moment is for him. He facilitated it, he is the very genesis of its design.

She reaches up a hand to the side of her face, the pads of her fingertips gently skimming over skin that is scabbed and vicious and angry red—in no particular hurry to heal.

When she drops her hand, he knows she is about to speak. He can always tell when she's about to say something, the little telltale inhale of breath, like she has to prepare herself. She always thinks about her words so carefully.

"Mr. J," she says, sounding uneasy. Unsure. "Do you… do you think I'm pretty?"

Whatever he was anticipating her to say, it was not this. She's looking at him, brows knitted together, genuinely unsure, and he decides to give her this, to humor her, mostly because he knows she needs the validation, and he is want to feed it to her.

" _Sure_ , kiddo," he says, spreading it on thick. "I mean, look at you,  _gorgeous_  gal like you, why, you could have any guy you wanted."

She looks down for a moment, unconvinced, perhaps the first time his flattery has fallen on deaf ears. "People stare at me," she says. "Everyone can see it. I feel like… sometimes I feel like everyone knows."

She would feel that way, wouldn't she? Walking around, shame festering like a stinking, open wound, her humiliation a tangible thing, worn on her sleeve like a bright red patch, thinking everyone can see just by taking one good look at her face. She fears the judgement, the criticism: you were easy. You let it happen. You were asking for it. You  _wanted_  to be raped, didn't you?

He grips the steering wheel with one hand. The sun is above the car now, so he flips up his shades. Stares straight ahead.

"They don't know. Nobody  _knows_." He looks at her. "You're only as ugly as you  _want_  to be," he says. "Take it from me. I know a thing or two about scars."

He can feel her eyeing him, her gaze soft and tentative and yet too hot, running all over his rippled scar tissue, like she's touching it with her bare hands. There's a question there, in her lingering gaze, but she wilts and doesn't ask it.

They stop at a gas station in the middle of nowhere sometime later. It's midday and too fucking hot. They're close.

Taylor follows him and gets out of the car. The door whines as it closes. He watches her from the other side of the car as he fits the nozzle into the gas tank. It probably feels good to stretch her legs. She yawns, open-mouthed, and leans against the trunk, facing him. Her coltish legs and pale thighs, banged up knees—skin littered with concrete scrapes, purpled scabs, and tender, bile-colored bruises. The hem of her dress skirts in the wind, the same color as the sky. She doesn't bother to push it down, which he finds uncharacteristic of her.

She sighs and turns so her back is against the trunk, and he watches her look out over the landscape, which is no different from any of the other gas stations they've stopped at. He's drawn to the pale column of her throat as she lets her head fall back, looking straight up, now—bored. Irritated. Hot.

"Do you think I could get a snack or something?" she asks, squinting up at the sun.

He's still staring at her. "Is that how we ask?"

Taylor furrows her brows at him, embarrassed.

"May I?" she corrects. "Please?"

He hides his smirk behind a displeased frown and digs through one of his pockets for some loose bills. He holds out a five to her and she looks at it like he's just gifted her with a precious diamond.

"I can spend the whole thing?"

"Knock yourself out."

She squeals girlishly, bites her bottom lip, already halfway towards the Mini Mart.

A minute later, when the gas pump clicks, indicating the tank is full, he screws the cap back on and hangs the nozzle up. He opens the driver's side door and sinks into his seat. Waits impatiently for Taylor, feeling antsy. Pent-up. It's so goddamn hot out here—here, in the middle of bumfuck Utah. He already itches for Gotham. Batman. He doesn't like to be away from the city for too long, doesn't like the idea of Batman thinking he up and left, that he went to play in somebody else's sandbox.

He looks up and catches his eyes in the rearview mirror and looks away, only to look back again and hold his own gaze, riveted. It catches him off guard sometimes, to see his own bare reflection, unmarred by red or white or black, all that heavy war paint, like a second skin. He sits up a little straighter, tilts his head back so he's looking at himself down the sharp slope of his nose. Turns his head from one side to the other, all that naked, puckered scar tissue, the sheen of ruined flesh. He thinks there might have been a time—too long ago to remember now—where the sight of his own naked flesh might have angered him, that he might have felt disturbed seeing his own reflection in a passing mirror. Perhaps he had gone out of his way to avoid them. But now? Now he seeks them out, goes out of his way to catch his own face reflected back at him in a glass window or door, a black, glossy TV screen, or those big silver security bubbles on the ceilings in stores. He feels hungry for his own reflection, his own face, like he can't remember the exact shape of his scars, even though he tastes them all the time, laves over them with his tongue out of habitual want. Needing to feel, to remember.

Bored now, he lets his head fall back against the headrest and turns to look through the passenger side window. What is taking her so fucking long? He drums his fingers against the center console and waits.

Waits.

Too long. She is taking too long.

He tongues at the rippled tissue inside his cheeks, thinking she probably can't decide between the red Twizzlers or the licorice ones. He rolls his eyes as he gets out of the car, slams the door. He should have expected this from her—he thinks how she has never been given a choice in her life about anything—her clothes, all hand-me-downs, and the food she eats, the school she goes to her, her waste-of-space foster "family"—how everything that's been given or done to her has been without her consent, without her input or say. She takes because she has nothing, no other choice. But now that she has choice, even just a thin slice of it, she doesn't even know what to do with it.

He opens the glass door to the convenience store, hates the obnoxious tinkling of the overhead bell. A thick sheet of stale, recycled air washes over him. It's quiet except for the hum from the wall of refrigerators and the sizzle of overhead fluorescents. He doesn't immediately see her, which annoys him—but then he turns, and, flanked by the refrigerated sodas and waters, she is cornered by a brawny figure. Some biker with nothing better to do, by the looks of it, wearing faded jeans and a worn, sleeveless leather jacket with various insignias and patches. His arms tell an even more colorful story, overlapping tattoos interrupted only by the threading of thick veins, extending like a series of roped cords up his forearms. Taylor is there, looking up at the man with her big 'I'll-believe-anything-you-say' doe eyes. He  _hates_  that fucking look. The man takes a step near, crowding even more into Taylor's space, and the Joker decides he's seen enough.

As he approaches—slowly, because he wants to see what the man will do—he thinks maybe what he hates so much is that she is looking at someone other than him with those eyes.

He stands behind the man. Clears his throat for effect.

And the man, all brawn, beefy muscle—the kind of man who eats other men for breakfast—turns to face him. Taylor sees him for the first time, too, looking both relieved and frightened to see him standing there.

"Am I uh, in-ter-rupting something?" he asks, because he knows that he is. He cocks his head to the side in a way that makes Taylor swallow, like she knows she's about to be in trouble, like he's caught her doing something naughty.

The biker looks him over, a head-to-toe sweep that the Joker accepts.  _Take a good look_.  _Take your time_ , he thinks.  _Like what you see?_  Then the other man folds his arms across his chest so his veins throb with an obscene sort of bulge. He's bald, but the Joker can tell from the color of his wiry goatee that his hair at one time may have been an ugly shade of shitbrown.

"We were just talking," the man says through a mouthful of gravel. The Joker can see the black stains on the inside of his gums, his teeth. Dip. "What do you want?"

"This is my friend," Taylor hastily interjects to the man, sensing the rising tension.

"Uncle," the Joker corrects, because it's better if people think that. Not that it really matters. He frowns a little, irritated that that this man is taking up his time.

"An uncle who is also a friend," he muses. "Huh." There is no mirth in his eyes when he looks at Taylor over his shoulder, then looks back at the Joker and fixes him with an interesting stare. "Funny. I can also be an uncle who is a friend, if the price is amenable."

Taylor frowns at the Joker, not understanding, and he looks at her in all of her helpless, naïve confusion. He loves her like this, when she is at his complete mercy, clutched within the palm of his own flippant and fleeting desires. When she has no idea of the fragility of her own life in his hands. When she has no idea at all of just how fucking rotten he really is.

"Amenable," he repeats. He clicks his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Pretends to think. He's very good at pretending. He looks skyward, rolls his head to the side, as if mulling over this proposition. "I can be  _very_  amenable."

Now both men turn to look at her. Taylor clutches a yellow bag of potato chips in both hands, wringing the crinkly exterior of the bag, looking unsettled and unsure, the very picture of innocent fragility, of something beautiful just crying to be broken.

"I—I think I'm ready to go now, uh—Uncle J."

"Me too, honey." He gestures to the counter with a nod of his head. Tells her to wait in the car once she's done.

And then he watches her do as she's told. After she's paid and clutches her bag and her bottle of fruit juice and the extra change, she turns to look at him, unsure. He doesn't offer her any reassurance, and once she's outside, he sees her look over her shoulder at him through the window once more. He waits for the car door to close before turning back to the man still waiting at his side.

He smiles.

* * *

Taylor waits for a long time in the stifling, stale heat of the car. She has to leave the door propped open, one leg sticking out, so she doesn't feel like she's roasting in a sun-cooked oven. She's too anxious to eat any of her snacks, and she doesn't like being out here alone, even if it's a relief that she hasn't seen another passing car in almost two hours. She keeps looking into the window of the store, but the glare from the sun prevents her from seeing inside. The minutes pass by in agonizing slowness. She wonders if Mr. J is hurt, if she should investigate, if he needs her in some way. But he told her to wait in the car, and he might be mad if she disobeys.

Boredom crawls over her skin, as pervasive as an itch, and she opens the center console and combs through its contents, finding nothing of interest, and then does the same with the glove box, sifting through an owner's manual, a half-used package of Kleenex, a screwdriver, some empty CD cases, napkins, an unused straw, and various other items of insignificance.

She tries to shut the glove box, only to discover that it won't close. She shoves the items farther back into the console and tries again, but quickly realizes that something is preventing it from closing all the way. She frowns, feeling a bead of sweat slide between her shoulder blades, all the way down to her lower spine. It tickles a little. She shifts and leans forward to investigate further. She only has to rummage for a moment before discovering what the item in question is.

Everything for a moment seems to freeze when she sees it, and then it is as if her body resets on autopilot, the way her hand reaches for and clasps around the handle as she pulls it towards her, careful to point the barrel away from her, feeling as though this moment in time has been caught in a strange fissure, like a single pebble of sand pinned precariously between a forefinger and a thumb.

Her mind races. Is it Mr. J's? And if it is, why did he bring it? What is he planning on using it for? Did he think there'd be a need for it?

She watches the way its black surface glimmers in the afternoon sun. A lethal beauty.

The moment shatters when the driver's side door is ripped open, and suddenly Mr. J is there, sliding into his seat with a heat that is suffocating in its intensity, like the burst from a solar flare.

He looks at her, and then he looks at the gun, frowning as he takes it from her and tucks it somewhere on his person, out of sight.

"Do not. Touch," he says, but Taylor barely hears him over the sound of her own blood rush, the wild throbbing of her heartbeat in her skull, her ears; this acute paralysis of fear.

She looks at him, and all she can see is the unadulterated crazy in his eyes.

It's as if someone had turned on a switch. He startles her when he leans forward and reaches around her to grab her seatbelt, stretching it across her chest, buckling it into place with a harried sort of frenzy. For a split moment, her heart swells at this demonstration of care for her well-being, her safety, but then it dissolves when he pulls back from her, and her gaze lowers. She stares at what might be a fleck of blood on his chin and on the unbuttoned collar of his shirt, which is soaked wet.

She opens her mouth to ask, but he is already back in his own seat, smoothing back his hair, checking his appearance in the rearview mirror. Licking his lips. Taylor is riveted by his vibrancy, his energy. He turns the key.

"Don't, don't,  _don't_  talk to strangers," he says, his voice high and nasal. He doesn't appear angry, which relieves her, but there is something even more sinister bubbling beneath his surface that she cannot identify. "Don't they teach you that in school?"

Taylor stares at him, not sure what to say. Mr. J peels out of the gas station, back out onto the open highway, and she holds onto the handle of the door to keep from being jostled.

She stares at him. She has to. Twitchy and restless, thrumming with something dangerous, something electric, some powerful undercurrent, like if you reached out to touch him, you might get shocked. His edges bleed fire—heat—something recently scorched, and it's all Taylor can do not to gape at him.

"Mr. J?" she says, uncertainly. She is scared to tell him she thinks he's driving too fast, so she bites her lip and waits until they're comfortably under the full onslaught of the sun, pulled onto the expanse of highway once more, which stretches out before them like the long, black tongue of a reptile "Mr. J? Is that… is that blood, on your chin?"

Suddenly, he laughs. It is full-belly, loud and nasal and jarring, making the hairs on her arms stand on end. He laughs, and his body seems to uncoil along with it, like a balloon slowly losing air. A manic softness releases itself, winding itself around the interior of the car like a snake. There is a frenzied sort of tenderness in the way he tilts his chin towards the rearview mirror to inspect the so-called blood for himself, and then looks at her.

"Oh, that? No, no, no, no. Nicked myself shaving just now. Just wanted to uh, spruce up a bit before we get there."

Taylor mulls over this information, even as she notes the strange glimmer in his eye. A sparkling darkness. "And that's why your shirt is wet, too?"

"Of course, doll face. What else would it be from?"

He stares at her in a way that feels like a challenge, and Taylor bites her lower lip and looks down, into her lap.

"Where did that man go?"

"Don't know," he replies.

"What did he want?"

"Something that wasn't for sale." He doesn't look at her. "That's the problem with the world these days. People," he begins, "the  _world_ —they all op-er-ate under the illusion that everything has a  _price_. But some things," he smacks his lips together,  _pop_ , "cannot be bought."

She's never really thought about it before, but she supposes she agrees.

He turns his neck to look at her, cuffing her chin, affectionate, smiling. "Not much longer," he says. He turns back to the dashboard, slides his sunglasses over his eyes. "Go to sleep."

She does.

* * *

Taylor wakes to an empty car. She jolts upright, gasping for breath, blinking in her surroundings.

Bad dream. It was just a bad dream.

She takes a shuddering breath and lays her head back against the headrest, breathing heavy, wondering if she's cursed to have these forever. As if what Nathan did to her wasn't cruel enough, now she must relieve the memory every time she closes her eyes. Even sleep can offer her no abditory, no safe space; all she has is dreams that punish, and she cannot escape what she cannot control.

_I'm the only one who can save you now._

Mr. J had been right all along, from the very beginning, hadn't he? Offering Nathan to her like this, on a platter, his gift to her, this secret promise of vengeance. Retribution. Sometimes it makes her blood curdle with how much she wants it, particularly in moments like these, when the memory is raw and pungent, where the scab on her face throbs and burns, like it too, remembers.

She wants it, and it makes her sick.

She licks her lips, mouth dry, tasting like cardboard and something artificial and tangy, maybe the bad aftertaste of her earlier fruit punch. The car is off, docked in the forgiving shade of a two-story pink stucco building, the color of cotton candy and Pepto-Bismol. She leans forward and looks up through the dashboard at the towering palm tree that looms over the car. She realizes she's never seen a palm tree before, not in real life anyway. Maybe a fake one, like on that school trip to the zoo she took in fifth grade. She unbuckles her seatbelt where it had been digging into the side of her neck and has left an obvious mark. She must have been knocked out for a while. The car smells stale and warm and a little bit like fast food that's been left out to marinate.

She cranes her neck, looking for Mr. J. Behind her, seen through the back window of the car, it's all flat desert planes for miles, dusty and brown, and then something craggy and unclear on the horizon, maybe a mountain, maybe a neighboring town, it's hard to tell for sure.

She slowly gets out of the car as the door cries in what has become a familiar protest. Taylor looks up, marveling at the open sky, a soft, lazy ribbon of lavender and pink. She inhales slowly. The air smells fresh and clean out here. She feels like she can breathe for the first time in a long time, like her lungs can fully expand. She turns slowly on her heel, moving in a circle, taking it all in; the stillness is like nothing she's ever experienced, but she thinks she likes it, finds that she doesn't miss the constant hum of Gotham, the city this mechanical beast that you cannot unplug.

She closes her eyes and smiles to herself, feels the hot wind on her face and the heat still radiating from the hood of the car, like the warm breath on your face right before a kiss. She is so entranced she doesn't hear the sound of shifting gravel behind her until there is a warm hand on the back of her neck. She squeals and hunches her shoulders up out of protective instinct, but then a second later she relaxes into the hold, knows it's Mr. J.

He steps closer to her, strokes the back of her neck gently with his thumb as she melts into his touch. She is unable to help herself as her head falls forward, chin-to-chest, as she lets him work the stiffness out of her neck. She's not sure what's brought on this sudden generosity, the kindness of his touch, but she does not question it for fear of making him take it away.

"I like it when you do that," she says, very quiet.

His voice is pitched low when he replies. "I know you do." He lets go and she feels his knuckles slide languidly down her back, skating over the grooves of her spine in a way that makes her shiver. It's light, almost a phantom touch, and she turns around to look up at him after, unsure if it was intentional, and cannot find anything in his expression to indicate that it was. He gestures with his head to the building.

"Inside," he says, stoic. She can never read him. Sometimes she thinks she'd give anything to know just what he's thinking, to be able to read whatever is happening behind those black eyes.

She glances into the backseat of the car and sees he's already taken her backpack inside, so she follows behind him and wonders if her legs feel like Jell-O because she's been cramped up in the car all day, or because of his knuckles running down her spine. She notices for the first time the neon sign near the side of the building, just next to the road.  _Paradise Motel_ , written in electric green cursive script, with a giant neon pink flamingo next to it. The word VACANY flashes at the bottom. It's obnoxious and outdated but for some reason Taylor likes it. Another sign just below that one, spelled out in block letters, reads FREE CONTINENTAL BREAKFAST & POOL. The parking lot is almost empty, dotted with a few scattered cars, weeds sprouting up from between the cracks, and faded white parking lines in desperate need of a repaint. Taylor steps over a cement parking chock and onto the sidewalk and follows Mr. J to the front entrance.

He holds open the glass door for her and allows her to enter first. A bell chimes above them. It's cold and dark inside, and the hairs on her arms stand at attention at the chill. She rubs her hands along her arms and stares at the maroon carpet, the green, textured wallpaper, the fake potted plants, the sagging, mismatched furniture. It looks nothing like the outside of the building, which promises a bright, sunny paradise complete with palm trees and poolside lounging, and Taylor sinks her teeth into her lower lip as she looks around. There's no one behind the check-in desk, but the office door just behind it is cracked and the light is on.

He leads her past a small dining area littered with more cheap furniture, plastic tables and chairs and vinyl pink tablecloths, like the kind you'd expect to find at a baby shower. A countertop pushed up against the wall, with leftover bagels and cold scrambled eggs, splashes of pulpy orange juice and cheap plastic silverware scattered in a little basket, next to the napkins. He leads her past all of this and down a long carpeted hall that smells like bleach and mothballs. The carpet seems to absorb the sound of their footfalls in a way that is slightly unsettling, like how she'd imagine it would be to step inside a noise-cancelling chamber. She'd read about one in her science class once.

Near the end of the hall, Mr. J slides a keycard out of the breast pocket of his Hawaiian shirt and inserts it into the door. It clicks open, and she steps inside, tasting the sharp bite of cleaning chemicals and bleach at the back of her throat. Her eyes water a little. She looks around as he flips on the light. The room is small and cramped. There's a TV and a mini fridge and a Mr. Coffee coffee maker and a plastic table with matching chairs, and there are two beds. Her gaze lingers on this last feature, unsure of whether she feels relieved or disappointed.

She steps further into the room and runs her fingers along the faux gold and red striped comforter that feels slightly tacky and damp from humidity. The wall behind the two beds is a strange, garish orange, the other three walls are spackled in an off-white paint. She notes the brown water stains on the ceiling, and the air conditioning unit below the window huffs noisily, like an asthmatic struggling for air.

Mr. J tosses the keycard on the dresser next to the black coffee bags which are laid inside white filters, the kind that Taylor always thought looked like little snowflake doilies when you flattened them out. She watches him kick off his flip flops.

"Home sweet home," he says.

It's not exactly what she had been expecting, but it excites her, being away from home, being here with Mr. J, just the two of them, sharing a room. She glances at him from over her shoulder and feels her skin flush when she sees him staring at her from where he sits on the edge of the bed.

"It's nice," she says. She wants him to know she's appreciative.

He snorts at her in reply. "Well aren't you just easy to please."

She goes to the sliding glass door and pulls back the blackout drapes. She gasps in surprise when she sees the pool. She had completely forgotten about having seen it advertised on the sign out front.

"Look, Mr. J!" she says, holding the curtain open wider so he can see. "Can I go swimming?"

He shrugs, non-committal, and flops onto the bed. His lays his hands over his abdomen and closes his eyes. She supposes he's pretty tired from the drive, still, she takes his lack of response as a yes.

In the bathroom, she sets her backpack on the counter, next to the folded towels and the miniature bottles of shampoo and conditioner. She worries over Mr. J hearing her pee, feeling self-conscious, and turns on the sink so he can't hear. Afterwards she washes her hands with pink soap, and dries her hands on a stiff white towel hanging from the rack. She is about to unzip her backpack when she realizes she did not bring a swimsuit. She didn't know there was going to be a pool.

She bites her lip and agonizes over this dilemma, eventually deciding to strip off her dress and pull on her oversized gray t-shirt, the one she had planned to wear to bed.

She steps out of the bathroom and half expects Mr. J to be sitting up on the side of the bed, waiting for her, but he's still in the same position as before, long legs stretched over the bed, bare feet planted on the floor, his back flat against the bed. She notes the steady rise and fall of his chest, and then stares a little too long at the blond hairs curling along his strong calves, and further up, his knees, and the pale skin of his upper thighs where his shorts ride up. She quickly averts her gaze.

She tiptoes to the sliding glass door, towel in hand, and gently skirts the curtain along the rod so she can slide open the door without waking him.

Outside, the air is warm and heady and the sky is a brilliant shade of orange, like the sunset on an Africa safari, the sun a brilliant gold coin, slipping below the horizon as if into the open clutch of a coin purse.

She pads in her bare feet across the concrete and opens the gate to the pool, setting her towel on a nearby plastic lounge chair. She feels brave, and she's all alone—so she takes off her oversized shirt and lays that on the chair, too, leaving herself in just her bra and underwear.

It's been almost five years since she's set foot in a pool. During one of her many stints with different foster families, she was, for a brief time, enrolled in swim lessons at the Olympic-sized pool at Gotham Tech, a community college that was close by. She was in a class with other girls and boys her age, for the sole purpose of swimming purported at the time to have some kind of healing capabilities.  _It can be very soothing to those who suffer from poor coping mechanisms and other traumas._ Straight from the mouth of her guidance counselor. She went to two lessons before she was removed, her foster family done. Back to the orphanage. Back to the start. Another family. Another family. Another family. Somehow they all end up being worse than the ones before, as if she's personally being punished for the longer she stays in the system. As if she has any choice in the matter.

She approaches the pool slowly, reverently, almost. It's small and rectangular shaped, only six feet at its deepest end. The whole of it is cast in shadow now, but the water is warm when she steps in, having spent all day baking under the sun.

She lets the water lap at her ankles, and then her calves. It feels good. It's the best she's felt in a long time.

She slips further in, all the way to her waist, and then she is crying out, rearing back, out of water, so she's only submerged up to her thighs. The 'J' on her hip burns. It must be the chlorine that makes it sting so sharply. She forces herself to push through it. The sensation fades after a while, and she's able to swim unbothered. She smiles to herself as she dives under the water, swims with her eyes open, pretending she's on an underwater safari in some exotic waters off the coast of some unnamed, sunny country. She holds her breath as long as she can, intent on finding the ever-elusive, translucent-skinned pufferfish. She surfaces with a gasp, giggling to herself. She swims around the pool and chatters to herself about sea animals and deep sea diving. She plans an elaborate mission with her team of marine biology experts, naming each one, imagining in great detail what they look like, giving them personalities, talking with them about fantastical sea creatures that may or may not exist—playing in a way she hasn't since she was a little kid and had no other way of entertaining herself. It feels like hours. She is so enthralled she doesn't notice a secondary presence until she hears the squeak of a plastic chair. She whips around and sees Mr. J lounging on the edge of the chair, elbows on his knees, leaning forward, watching her. She blushes furiously.

"How long have you been siting there?"

He smirks at her in a way that is answer enough, and she groans and dives under the water, wondering if he heard her talking to herself, holding herself underwater until her blush settles. When she surfaces, she swims towards him, to the edge of the pool, and props herself onto the ledge, the concrete cool and scratchy beneath her forearms.

"Do I look like a mermaid?" she asks, feeling playful, splashing her legs, batting her eyelashes up at him.

She catches the way his throat bobs when he swallows. He leans closer towards her. "You sure do, princess." He is staring at her in a way that makes her feel exposed. Naked. She feels her cheeks heat under his careful attention, and decides she likes this warmth. She likes him looking at her like this. It feels like maybe he shouldn't, but she likes it too much to pay attention to the small prickle of unease. She grins at him and dives under the water.

Mr. J sits and watches her and says nothing the whole time. "Do you want to come in, too?" she asks, hopefully, but he says no, and she doesn't ask him again.

She swims until her fingers and toes are pruned and shriveled and the water is too cold, and the pool is lit only by the stray light from the lamps in the parking lot.

She climbs out and shivers, dripping water everywhere, goose bumps rippling over her skin in a way that is almost painful. Her lips are purple and her teeth clatter audibly as she hurries to her towel. She remembers only after she's emerged from the pool that she's only in her bra and panties, and Mr. J is just there,  _looking_ at her. She wraps herself in her towel as quickly as she can, unable to meet his eyes. She knows her face is beet red. She bends to grab her t-shirt and then Mr. J is standing, following behind her back to the room.

She shivers in the air conditioning and tries to calm her chattering teeth. In the bathroom, she strips off her wet undergarments and then wonders what on earth to do with them. She doesn't want to hang them over the shower curtain where he can  _see_. In the end, she ends up doing just that, and then slings her wet towel over them to hide them from view. That'll have to do. She changes into dry underwear, and throws her t-shirt on. She brushes her teeth, finds some lotion that smells pink and flowery to spread on her face, and then rings her hair out in the sink, lastly grabbing a dry towel to drape over the back of her shoulders as her hair dries so her shirt doesn't get wet. She doesn't stare too long at her reflection in the mirror when she's done. The scab is still healing, and looking at it only serves as a reminder as to why she's really here. She doesn't want to think about that right now.

She pads back into the room and sees a pizza box on Mr. J's bed. Her eyes widen in pleasant surprise, and she notices for the first time how hollow her stomach feels. He is already halfway through a second slice, sitting on the edge of the bed, watching TV. Local news. She gauges his reaction to make sure it's okay before she reaches for her own pizza slice, cradling it in a thin napkin and taking it to the other side of the room to the little plastic table hosted by two chairs. She folds her knees to her chest and then slides her oversized t-shirt over them to keep her legs warm. She burns the roof of her mouth on greasy cheese and blistering hot tomato sauce, and she is shivering from the air conditioning and her hair is stringy and wet and smells like chlorine from the pool, but she realizes, for the first time in a long time, she is really, truly happy in this moment. Mr. J chews noisily and with his mouth open, on his third slice now, and she hurries her slice down too so she can get another before it's all gone. Afterwards, her mouth is salty and warm and the roof of her mouth stings a little, and Mr. J gives her some loose change so she can get them something to drink from the vending machine in the lobby. She gets him a Coke and an orange soda for herself.

Back in the room, the TV is still on, and Mr. J is doing something on his phone. She cleans up her mess and stands in the middle of the room for a minute, expecting him to say or do something, but he doesn't even glance at her. She chews on her lower lip and decides to slip under the covers of her bed, feeling full and sated, and when she sinks under the covers, exhaustion settles itself heavily all over, weighing her down and making her feel weightless all at the same time. It feels good, she thinks. And her eyes are so heavy. She leans against the headboard and lets her skin warm beneath the covers.

She sighs when she thinks about how Mr. J's barely said anything to her since they arrived. She feels like he's distracted, preoccupied, and other than at the pool, it's been hard to get his attention. She looks at him on his bed, his back similarly resting against the oak headboard, his brows furrowed in concentration. She can't help but feel like the distance between them is too great, and she wonders how to bridge the space without seeming needy or obvious in her want for his attention.

"Mr. J?" she says. He grunts in acknowledgement, still not looking at her. "Do you wanna watch a movie or something?"

He does allow his eyes to slide up and over to her then, lowering his cell phone. He reaches for the remote control and tosses it to her, where it lands at her feet.

"Pick us something good," he says.

She smiles and flips through channels. It takes her a while of surfing and waiting for commercials to end before she settles on Jurassic Park. It looks like it's just started. She asks if it's okay and he hums in response. Mr. J stays on his phone for the first thirty minutes, and Taylor wonders exactly what it is that he's doing that's so important. She wonders if it has to do with Nathan, or if it's something else, something back in Gotham. A little while later, the phone is ringing, and he's taking the call out into the hallway where she can't see him. She huffs in irritation and doesn't really enjoy the movie now that he's not here to watch it with her.

He's gone for a really long time. Taylor slips a little further under the covers to get comfortable, and doesn't realize she's fallen asleep until she wakes up with a gasp. The lights are off and it's pitch black, and for a moment she doesn't know where she is. She sits up, breathing shallowly. It takes a moment for her eyes to adjust, and she remembers. She turns to look at the glowing red numbers from the alarm clock. It's just after three AM.

She listens to the air conditioning unit beneath the window cycle off with a stuttering series of clicks, like a lawn mower winding down, and then it's silent. She realizes this is the first time in a long time that she's woken from a completely dreamless sleep. It feels strange and a little unnatural.

There's a sick, waning yellow light from the streetlamps in the parking lot that crawls in through a crack in the curtains, illuminating a sliver of floor and the corner of her bed, which feels too big and too empty all the sudden. She turns over and looks at Mr. J, his back to her, asleep on his side. He's so still, he barely looks like he's breathing.

She doesn't even think before she is pushing back her covers and crossing the short distance between their beds. She slips under the covers beside him, rustling she sheets, and she is terrified for several heart-clenching moments when he stirs. She waits in agonizing stillness, holding her breath.

He settles, exhaling, and she does the same, awash in relief.

She pushes herself up against him then, curling against the warmth of his back, the shape of her like a question mark. This close, she can smell him—ripe with day-old sweat, the chemical stink of gasoline that slides all the way into the back of her throat, and something else she can't put a name to. She dares to reach out to touch his back, spread her palm out, so gently, the way she flattens it against his spine, letting his warmth soak into her hand, marveling at the fact that she can touch him like this, give him the tenderness that she so desperately craves. She doesn't think about what he'll do in the morning when he wakes and finds her pressed up against him like this, if he'll be angry or upset. Maybe he'll feel disappointment—perhaps disgust.

Mostly she doesn't think about tomorrow at all.

Tomorrow—Nathan.

What she does think about is suspending this moment in time, wishing there was some science that would allow her to prolong moments like these, some kind of magic she could swing a lasso around and pull to her, so she could trap just the two of them in this specific crevice in time. Let the rest of the world go on without them, she thinks. Take them out of this timeline, let them exist in another, some secret dream place that only they can share. The two of them are the kind of people who no one will miss when they're gone. She knows this to be true, more than she knows anything else.

She thinks sometime during the night, he pushes back against her, like he wants to be closer. She thinks maybe he turns around and noses into her hair when he thinks she is asleep. Thinks she can feel him hovering over her in the dark, caged by the heat of him, his body crowded low over hers. Think she feels his warm, wet breath on her neck. Thinks she hears him groan.

Or maybe she just wants these things badly enough that she dreams them into a phantom existence. She'll never know for sure.

* * *

She wakes feeling sick to her stomach. He's gone—which shouldn't surprise her—but what does surprise her is that she is back in her own bed. Had last night even happened at all, or had she dreamt it? She snags her teeth on her lower lip and chews, pushing away her covers, as if they've personally offended her.

Morning sunlight forces itself into the room with hot insistence, and Taylor slides back the curtains—already warm—to let it in. The pool glimmers at her and winks invitingly. She wonders if she'll have time to go for another swim.

The bathroom door opens then, thick blankets of steam rolling out, and Mr. J emerges wearing attire similar to yesterday's. His hair—wet from the shower—curls around his nape, hanging just above the collar of his shirt. There's a toothbrush lodged in his cheek, hanging out of the corner of his mouth like a cigarette.

He removes it to greet her. "Morning."

"Hi," she says, shyly, a little anxious, wondering if he has any recollection of last night. If last night was a thing that even happened.

"You hungry?"

She nods yes, and he lets her get cleaned up in the bathroom before she is following him down the dimly lit carpeted hall and into the lobby. She runs her fingers along the border that separates the bottom half of the wall with the top half, the pads of her fingers collecting gray tufts of dust. They pass a cleaning lady on the way there, parked outside someone else's door with a cart full of supplies. She's older and harried looking, heavy, rolls of skin pinched tight around her middle, under her bra strap. Midnight blue bags are stacked beneath her eyes, and her name tag is pinned precariously to a breast, lopsided, something in Spanish, something she can't pronounce with a lot of accent marks in it. She watches Taylor as she walks past, and Taylor can't help but look back over her shoulder at her, feeling unnerved by her stare. Like a warning. She walks a little faster to catch up with Mr. J.

They fill up clear plastic plates, buffet style. Taylor gets one of everything, and piles her waffles with maple syrup and whipped cream and sprinkles on a handful of blueberries. She lines the outer rim of her plate with big, fat strawberries.

They sit down for a feast, each of them with two or three plates each. Taylor takes a couple of bites, but she can't help but feel like she's in a reenactment of the Last Supper, and she's the only one privy to this knowledge.

Mr. J, at least, is in a good mood. Yesterday he had been so serious and distracted, and today he thrums with a restless energy, eating too fast, like a man starved. She can't help but want to gravitate towards him when he's like this, like she too wants to be enveloped in this fury of energy, fed sugary-tasting poison, taken under with urgent insistence, held there. Drowned.

And she wants to eat—she's so hungry—but her stomach's a coiled up ball of thick knots that won't untangle itself, it has been since she woke up, and it's with reluctance that she has to put down her fork. She sits back in her chair and stares at her food, and Mr. J either doesn't notice or doesn't care.

"Are we going to talk about tonight?" she asks, a little too abruptly, her irritability starting to bleed through. She is careful to keep her voice down even though nobody else is around. Come to think of it, she hasn't seen another patron since they got here, just those empty cars in the parking lot, and the maid. She folds her arms across her chest, feeling petulant all the sudden. How can he act so unaffected? "Are we going to talk about Nath—"

"It's all  _taken care of_ , sweetheart." Mr. J's leg is bouncing beneath the table, like he can't help it. But it stops, suddenly, and he startles her by reaching down, grabbing the legs of her chair and pulling her closer to him. She lets out a small sound of surprise when the front legs of her chair leave the floor. The back legs skid against the floor, and the front touch back down as he lets go. They're so close—Taylor can't breathe—as he tangles his legs with hers, so that she can't get away. He drops his head, leans forward to invade her personal space in a way that makes her heart convulse, like it's about to cave in. " _Relax_ ," he breathes.

It all happens so fast. She stares into his dark eyes, trying to find her footing in there, but it's like walking in a midnight forest and not knowing where her feet are going to land.

"Okay," she whispers, unblinking, feeling as though she's been hypnotized, like he's just cast a spell on her with that one simple command.

He sits upright. Clears his throat. She watches him shovel more food into his mouth, feeling the heat from where he still keeps her legs happily ensnared beneath the table with his. He gestures to her plate with his fork, grunting through a mouthful of eggs. "Eat your breakfast."

She does what he says. She always does.

* * *

It's noon, and she has time to kill. Mr. J is gone—he doesn't say where—but not without leaving her with less than specific instructions to  _be ready_  at ten o'clock.

"Be ready for what?" she asks. And he only looks at her as if she already knows, and that scares her, because she doesn't know. She has no idea what to expect, what he has planned, how this is going to go. He hasn't told her anything.

She keeps her shirt on this time when she goes to the pool, like it can offer her some extra layer of protection against her nerves. She tries to swim the nausea away, but the chlorine only exacerbates her anxiety as the afternoon wears on. It's a dry, hot day. No wind. The sun scorches the concrete around the pool, and Taylor can only tolerate it by standing on her tiptoes, and even then it's only for seconds at a time before she has to dive back into the pool for relief. She swims for a long time, nausea sloshing around in her belly, the taste of bile just a phantom burn in the column of her throat. She frantically swims to the edge of the pool twice with the abrupt need to vomit, but nothing comes.

She tries to play, tries to pretend she's a mermaid with evil pirates lurking just offshore, but the fantasy tastes bitter, and it's hard to think about anything other than tonight. How surreal it all feels, that she's here, that she let Mr. J whisk her thousands of miles away from Gotham, that she can innocuously swim in a pool while later tonight she will do something to Nathan that is irreversible, that will change things forever. Something that is terrible, perhaps more terrible than what he did to her.

Mr. J talks to her about retribution, about Nathan getting what he deserves. And while she doesn't think she could ever be capable of forgiving him, perhaps she could learn to live with the consequences of his actions. Her wounds will suppurate and fester, maybe she'll go septic before this is all over, she'll be kneeling and sick and wanting death, like being back on that bridge all over again. But then, maybe with time, her wounds could heal completely. That's what they always say, isn't it? Time heals all wounds.

But then she starts to think about all the hurt people she's encountered in the revolving door of her life, all the people who've been broken and beat down by the fist of life, force enough to stun you, or at least knock you out cold so that life can have its way with you, urgent and insistent, like an animal in heat. Mr. J would say it's dubious, that some people ask for it. They  _want_  it. But that's not right. It's  _insidious_. And she thinks that perhaps wounds like that don't heal at all. Perhaps they just scar.

She's knows enough about scar tissue to know that the skin is never really the same, after. The nerve endings react differently, the sensations are altered, a little more sensitive, almost.

She wishes they could have talked about it. What is supposed to happen after all this? She can't go back to Evelyn's. Will Mr. J take care of her? She has nowhere else to go. Is this really what she wants? And why did she let him convince her that he would take care of everything? She has to know, she needs to know how this is supposed to play out, what is going to happen, what her role is, what he  _expects_  of her, she just needs—

She is out of the pool and hunched over in the plastic recliner, sitting cross legged, dry heaving into her own folded lap, gasping for breath as the sun beats down hot and unforgiving from overhead. She digs her fingernails into her calves, but the pain feels far away, and it's not enough. Her hair drips wet all over her bare thighs, and she can't feel that either. All she knows is that she can't breathe, she can't breathe, she can't  _breathe_ —

A warm hand on her shoulder, hesitant. Sobering. She nearly startles out of her own skin. She looks up, has to blink against the glare of the sun to see a figure standing over her. A pretty, translucent halo around their head, and then the figure bends lower, coming into view, and Taylor can see the tenderness spread openly over a concerned face.

It's a  _boy_.

A boy, not much older than her, maybe even the same age. Short black hair, swept up, off his forehead. Square, sharp jaw and arctic blue eyes. He looks kind. Worried. Her eyes openly sweep over him, taking him in.

She opens her mouth to say something, but nothing comes.

"I'm sorry if I startled you," he says, he takes his hand from her shoulder. "I saw you through the window—" he gestures to one of the second floor apartments on the balcony, tucked behind metal railings that are chipped with green paint "—and it looked like you were choking. I wanted to make sure you were okay…."

She looks up at him, wide-eyed, chest still heaving.

"I wasn't watching you or anything," he stammers, nervous. "I know that sounds creepy, what I said about the window and all, I was just bored, and I saw—" he stops himself, taking a breath. "Are you okay?" he asks.

Taylor summons all of her strength to nod her head at him. Her mouth tastes dry and acrid. She licks her lips and swallows, urging moisture back into her mouth.

"Thank you," she manages, in a cracked voice that sounds nothing like her own.

"Do you—can I get you something to drink? Water?"

She shakes her head. "No," she croaks. Her mouth is so dry, but she thinks she'd just throw it up if she tried to drink anything now.

The boy casts a welcome shadow over her curled up form, but it shifts when he bends down to pull up a nearby lounge chair, the plastic scraping against the concrete as he tugs it close and sits on the side of it, facing her.

"My name's Ian," he offers, ducking his head a little, trying to meet her gaze, which she's fixated on a wet spot on the concrete that is quickly drying. "What's yours?"

She looks up at him as she tells him, thinking how strange it sounds, coming out of her own mouth. And if he's at all put off by the giant rough patch of scabbed over skin adorning the whole right side of her face, he doesn't let on, simply looking at her like he doesn't see it at all, as if it weren't even there.

"Cool," he says, and Taylor is surprised to hear that he sounds genuinely interested. "So do you like… live around here?" he asks. "We're from Seattle, you ever been?" Taylor shakes her head know, and he continues. "My mom dragged me here with my new stepdad and then they abandoned me for the casinos." He shrugs, like he didn't really expect anything different. "I don't know why they brought me here anyway. Mom said she wanted us to spend time together as a family… so far the only family thing we've done—" he pauses to put air quotes around the word 'family', "—is eat at crappy local restaurants and tour this stupid glass museum." He scratches the back of his neck. "And then mom makes me hang out in the lobby every night for an hour so my stepdad can screw her."

Taylor looks at him, wide eyed, flushed, surprised that he's so openly divulging all of this information to her. That he's even talking to her to begin with.

"Shit. That was probably too much, wasn't it? I'm sorry. I've just been so bored, you're the first person here who's my age. How old are you, anyway?"

"Fourteen," she says, and then because she kind of likes him and his big mouth and his shock of black hair, she asks, "How old are you?"

He sits up a little straighter. "I'm fourteen too, but I'll be fifteen in November." He pulls his arm across his chest to scratch an itch at his elbow. "So where are you from, anyway?"

Taylor licks her lips, loosening her towel a little because it's so hot. "Jersey," she says, "you know, Gotham?"

His eyebrows nearly skate up into his hairline. "Are you kidding me? You guys are on the news all the time. They're always sending in the National Guard and stuff. I can't believe you live there… have you ever, like… met Batman?"

"No," she replies, out of instinct, only to realize a moment later that yes, yes she has. She watched him nearly beat Mr. J to death in all that blood-flecked snow.

"That's insane though," he says, his eyes lighting up, "I'd probably never leave my house if I lived there. All those crazies." He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, looking at her, so open and friendly. Taylor wonders for the first time if this is what it feels like to be friends with someone, to be friends with a boy. She's taken by the warm crinkles under his eyes when he smiles, and how he's such a flurry of movement and activity, like he can't sit still. The way he looks at her like he doesn't want to miss a thing, like he's storing everything she says for later, like he wants to remember it because he finds her interesting. It's so different from the way Mr. J looks at her. There's no purpose, no hidden intent in Ian's gaze, only genuine interest and warmth.

"So who are you here with anyway?" he asks.

"My uncle, we're driving across the country, doing this bonding thing." She shrugs, and then bites her lip, a little ashamed of how easy the lie comes. She feels a pang in her gut when she realizes she doesn't want to lie to him. Doesn't like the bitter sapor of dishonesty.

"Sounds awful," Ian grins.

They talk for a long time. Taylor almost forgets why the boy came out here in the first place. And later, as the sun begins to dip lower and their skin is hot from the sun and they're both sweating, he asks if she wants to go swimming, she says yes without hesitation. And this time, none of her previous anxieties or bouts of nausea accompanies her, for which is relieved.

Taylor tries not to stare at him when he takes off his shirt. The boys in her swim class always had to swim with shirts on, that was the rule. Ian seems unaware of her ogling him, and she bites her lip as she appreciates his long, flat torso, miles and miles of pale skin, the tight curve of his waist, his long, gangly arms that he hasn't grown into yet.

Taylor keeps her own shirt on as she wades into the pool, and Ian enters via a cannonball that sends water splashing everywhere. She giggles in delight.

"Do another one!" she encourages, her eyes lit up. "I'll score you."

"Like an Olympic judge?" he grins. He swims to the edge of the pool and hoists himself out onto the concrete, water dripping everywhere. "Alright, here I go." He strikes a ridiculous pose for the pretend photographers, and then very seriously salutes Taylor. She smiles as he backs himself all the way into the fence, giving himself a generous running start before sprinting forward and doing backflip into the pool. Taylor gasps in surprise, throwing up her hands.

"How did you do that?!" she cries.

Ian flips his hair back, smiling. "You like that? Tell me my score."

"Ten!" Taylor says. No question.

He grins like she's just told him he won the lottery. Or perhaps in this case, like he's just won the Olympics.

He swims to the shallow end so he can stand, then turns to face her. He clears his throat with a level of dramatism that has Taylor wondering if he does theater at school, and then he stands very stoic, as if perched in front of a podium. "I'd just like to thank all my generous supporters out there, everyone who believed in me, and all my fans for being here today for this record-breaking moment."

"What about me?" Taylor pipes up from the deep end, flushing a little when he tilts his head at her and smiles.

"Are you kidding? You're my biggest fan. I'm sharing my prize money with you."

Taylor giggles, and they swim towards each other, meeting each other halfway somewhere in the middle of the pool, where they still have to doggy paddle to keep their heads above the water.

"What are you going to do with your half of the prize money?" he asks, a little breathless from the exertion of keeping float.

Taylor looks at him, thinking. "I'm not sure," she says. "I've never thought about what I'd do if I had a lot of money." She bites her bottom lip, unsure. "Buy a whole bunch of food, I guess."

Ian looks at like she just told him she was going to spend her entire fortune on a set of encyclopedias.

" _Food_? That's so boring! Do you know what I'd do with my half?" he asks, and Taylor swims a little closer, panting with the effort to stay afloat, their breath mingling, their legs slippery and smooth beneath the water, sliding against each other accidentally, but she kind of likes it. "I'd buy my own island—a private one—and I'd build a house and I'd just stay there forever and I'd do whatever I wanted."

Taylor's mouth parts, eyes wide, fascinated by this. "Don't you think you'd get lonely?" she wonders.

He grins at her. "Nah, I'd have you there to keep me company."

Taylor's eyes widen in surprise. "Really? You'd want to take me?"

"Sure," he says, shrugging easily. "You're really cool."

Taylor blushes so hard that she has to look away. She ducks under the water for nothing better to say, and he follows, and they make a game of tag out of it. At one point he grabs her from behind and wraps both arms around her middle, and she screams in glee and flails her legs and he doesn't let go, and she thinks maybe that this is the happiest she's ever been—a happiness so pure and unfettered she doesn't think she really knew what it meant to be happy before. She spins around in his arms and instinctively coils her legs around his waist to hold on, and she throws her head back and closes her eyes in a smile she can nearly taste. He holds onto her waist under the water to steady her, and when she straightens, and they're both eye level again, he's looking at her with his mouth parted, something like wonder in his eyes. She's never seen anyone look at her that way before. And this time it's him who blushes, except it's only the tip of his ears that turn red, which Taylor thinks is adorable. She unwinds her legs from around his waist and he lets go, and the insides of her thighs still feel warm from where they had touched the bare skin of Ian's stomach and waist.

"My fingers are all pruny," she giggles, breaking their silence, showing him her hands.

"Mine too," he agrees, crinkling his nose. "And I'm starving." He scratches the back of his neck, looking unsure for a moment. "You wanna come to our room? We've got leftover Thai food from last night, there should be enough for both of us."

Taylor nods eagerly. She never passes up food.

Ian looks relieved, smiling at her, and they both swim back to the shallow end and climb the steps of the pool. She feels exhausted, and so happy.

Taylor retrieves her towel and wraps it around her shoulders, following Ian out of the pool area and up the metal staircase to the second floor. She waits for him to unlock the door, and when she takes a minute to look out into the desert, where the sun has just begun to set, she marvels at how the drooping powerlines dotted along the landscape glimmer like gold chains. It's so fiercely pretty it nearly takes her breath away.

Ian goes in first and she follows, inspecting the room as she closes the door behind her. It's almost the same as her room downstairs, with the added addition of a larger mini fridge and a microwave.

Ian bends down and starts taking plastic cartons out of the fridge, lining them along the edge of the dresser. The curtains are pushed open, and the sunset looks even more beautiful from here. The whole room golden and warm and tangerine orange, like the afterglow of a slowly dying fire, where the embers are still hot.

There is luggage strewn around the room and personal belongings on the dresser, a little bottle of perfume, scattered pieces of jewelry that Taylor assumes belongs to his mother. A can of aftershave next to the sink, spied from the open door to the bathroom. A pillow from home on the bed, in a Star Wars pillowcase. Taylor smiles a little.

She's overwhelmed by the smell of them—Ian, his mother, his stepdad. This is what family smells like, she thinks, this inimitable smell you carry with you everywhere you go, permeating through whatever little space you happen to be existing in at the time; a corner booth in a restaurant, the inside of the family car, or your usual pew in the middle row at church, on Sundays. Taylor knows this smell. She was envious of it, as a little kid. In some ways, maybe she still is.

She is invited to Jennifer Henry's seventh birthday party one summer, right before the transition back to school. It was a pity invite, one of those invitations that got passed around to everyone in the class regardless of whether you were a friend or not, just so you wouldn't feel left out when everyone got a pretty purple envelope except for you.

She remembers so acutely walking through her front door, a cheap gift wrapped in yellow tissue paper, tucked inside one of those generic gift bags that had been recycled a million times, clutched in a sweaty hand. Walking through their hardwood foyer, like walking the plank, her foster mother's hand at her back, a sharpened sword urging her forward. And the smiling faces on the walls on either side of her. Family portraits, a timeline of togetherness. Unity. A father's arm clasped lovingly around the shoulder of his wife. The mother, the beautiful matriarch, with a tender hand on the thin shoulder of a boy with just enough freckles, not too many, and his little gap-toothed smile. The smile of a boy who loves finding frogs in the garden and throwing a baseball in the yard with his dad, whose bedsheets are probably printed with colorful cars and tractors, or different kinds of dinosaurs. And the little girl, Jennifer, hands folded oh-so-gently in her lap, a little lady. All that lace and frill, the pink ribbon in her hair, her soft blue eyes. Taylor's stomach feels as if it's furling in on itself, a sail that's bowed to the wind, caved in from the strain. It's so lovely and perfect. This is what want feels like. Jealous, needy want, bubbling desire, this unforgiving pulse in her belly. Her palms are too sweaty to leave behind falcate prints, so she clenches her fists harder, desperate for her nails to break through that skin, just a little bit, needing the cheap sobriety that only pain can bring. This is a storm she cannot weather; her stomach roils, churning like craggy waves at sea, and she purges something green and acidic all over those beautiful glossy floors, and no one understands.

"Hey, Ian? Is it okay that I'm here? Your parents aren't going to be mad?"

"They're not gonna be back for hours. I'll probably already be asleep." He stops to look at her still standing in the doorway, dripping water everywhere, clinging to her towel. It's just as sopping wet as she is. "Here," he says. He gets up to rummage through a green duffel bag, producing a gray t-shirt. "You can change into this."

Taylor takes it from him appreciatively. She changes quickly in the bathroom, taking off her bra and her own t-shirt, but leaving on her panties, even though they're still wet. She can't exactly take them off, and the shirt he gave her just barely skirts past the tops of her thighs. She brings the collar of it to her nose. It smells like him. She doesn't know why that makes her feel so warm and happy.

She emerges to find that Ian's finished heating everything up in the microwave, and he's spooning out a variety of different noodles and chickens and spicy-smelling sauces onto two paper plates. He passes one to her and smiles. Taylor sits in the middle of one of the beds—the one with the Star Wars pillowcase—and Ian joins her, sitting next to her, both of their folded Indian style, plates in their laps, warming their thighs, their knees touching. He turns on the TV to a movie they both like, and neither of them pay attention, too busy talking with their mouths full. She laughs until she cries when Ian sticks a pair of chopsticks up his nose and pretends to be a walrus. It's stupid and goofy and she loves it.

She doesn't realize how sunburned she is until Ian prods at her knee with his finger, and they both watch as the skin turns pale before returning to a hot shade of pink. Ian's sunburnt as well, she can tell from where the line of his boxer shorts rides a little lower than his swim trucks had, revealing a track of pale skin.

He scrunches his nose, almost as if he were apologetic. "Guess we were out there for longer than we thought, uh?" he grins.

He asks her about her favorite music then, and her favorite movies, and halfway through his plate, he gets up to rip out a blank page from his mom's day planner and eagerly scribbles down all of his recommendations. Taylor likes the way he holds the pencil to his lips when he's thinking, and the look of intense concentration on his face when he bends his head low to write.

"Oh, you'll love this song. It's one of my favorites."

Taylor smiles at him, and their fingers brush when he hands her the paper—it's full, front and back. She admires his sloppy handwriting, tracing her fingers over it.

"Thank you for this," she says, earnest. No one's ever done anything like this for her before.

"You're welcome," he says. They stare at each other for a moment, and Ian's throat bobs when he swallows, looking like he wants to say more. "You know, you… you don't look like the girls who go to my school," he says at length. He traces a series of loops and swirls on the bedspread with a long finger. Then he's looking up at her with big blue eyes, his forehead creased a little. "You're like, really pretty," he says, and she can see his ears turning red when he says it. He has to clear his throat. They both look away.

No one's ever told her she was pretty. No one except Mr. J.

"I saw you yesterday," he blurts, panic spread over his features before he smooths it out. "Swimming in the pool, I mean." He opens his mouth. Closes it. Thinks about what he's going to say, looking sheepish. "My parents were out, and I was so bored…." He looks down to pick at a piece of loose skin around a fingernail. "I wanted to come down and talk to you then. It looked like you were having fun, but then that guy was there…." He trails off, finally looking up at her. "Was that your uncle?"

Oh,  _shit_.

Taylor's eyes are wild as they dart to the digital clock on the nightstand. It's almost eleven o'clock. Her heart drops into the pit of her stomach, and it feels as if it's stopped beating entirely. Oh, shit, shit,  _shit_. How could she have forgotten? How could she let time slip away so easily?

She can feel her face turning white, pale, all the blood draining, embarking to some other place, like it too does not want to be present for what is about to occur. Her extremities tingle, arms and legs, like they've fallen asleep. She can't feel anything but her own terror, laid down inside of her like a slowly encroaching poison.

"I—I'm so sorry, I have to go," she stammers. She is already scrambling off the bed.

"Hey, hey, wait," he says, so tender and concerned. He gets up as well, holding up his arms, like the way you do when you're trying to calm a startled animal. He approaches her as if she were a bird with a broken wing. Like he doesn't want to scare her away so that he can fix whatever is wrong. It makes her heart ache. It makes her want to cry. "Is it your uncle? Do you have a curfew or something?"

"Um," she swallows, "Something like that." She is trembling so hard. She can barely stand. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

She pushes past him to the door, throwing it open, where it hits the wall with a force she didn't intend. She can hear Ian behind her, running to the door as well. Her name all tangled in his mouth, shouting for her—apologizing, for some inane reason, as if this is at all his fault.

She sprints down the stairwell, and the metal groans beneath her weight. She jumps the last three steps and lands on the concrete on her hands and knees. She gasps, the pain dizzying. She moans as she stands, looking at her kneecaps, where little slivers of blood have started to ooze out from her skin. But there's no time to focus on the pain. She gets back up and races past the empty pool, shrouded in the night, awash in the milky caress of the full moon. The way it illuminates the water, so still, now, as if she and Ian hadn't been splashing around it only a few hours ago.

She slides open the sliding glass door, and the sound it makes as it slides across the partition is urgent, desperate, like a shrill scream.

"Son of a  _bitch."_

The hairs on Taylor's neck and arms stand on end at his voice. She's never heard Mr. J swear before. She barely has time to register him stomping across the room before his hand is around her throat, so hard she cries.

"I'm so sorry, Mr. J," she gasps. The brutality is alarming. Tears are streaming down her face. Her legs give out beneath her and she goes to her knees, almost as if in supplication. A sinner begging for forgiveness before their god.

Only, this god is not so benevolent, and as his hand tightens around her throat—she knows forgiveness is something he will not award.

"Where the  _fuck_  have you been?" he snarls, spittle spraying on her face. Taylor closes her eyes against his onslaught, the intensity of him, heavy, crushing, too much. His hot breath on her face scorches her, and she has no choice but to inhale, gasping for air, his fingers so tight. She feels as though her lungs have caught fire, burning inside her as easily as paper. Through her blurred eyes, she sees his flared nostrils, the red in his eyes, a daylight monster—not the kind that hides in the closet or under the bed, no; the kind who has no qualms about being seen, who exist in the world so transparently you maybe don't recognize them at first. The kind who follow at a close distance, but by then it's too late. The claws are in, the fangs are out, and you're so stupid to never have noticed them before. That's how she feels. Stupid.

"I—" Her hands are on her neck, over his, fighting him, and she is gasping and everything is sort of fuzzy around the edges, and her legs kick uselessly and her eyes are starting to roll back into her head—

 _Slam_.

Her head against the wall, now, her body following, legs all tangled up beneath her. He presses her there, kneeling in front of her, down on one knee, and her head lolls, her eyes desperately trying to track him as the world swims and swirls. When he releases her neck, she gasps for air, sucking in oxygen. She looks up and see that his eyes have changed, his demeanor different all of the sudden. His hands are in her hair, petting her in a way that feels deranged as he shushes her and coos. His voice, far away and too close all at once, telling her it's okay, everything's going to be alright. Then her head pillowed against his chest, his arms around her middle, holding her to him, so tight. The hug she's always wanted, only, she is incapable of returning the gesture, her arms limp at her sides. She cannot find the strength to move them. She shudders out a series of sobs, terrified of having his hands around her neck again. She really thought he was going to kill her.

"Mr. J," she gasps, "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Please forgive me.  _Please_." She presses the words into his chest, close to his heart, wishing her words could pierce straight through all his layers of clothes and skin, straight to that mass of pulsating muscle.

Funny, to so desperately beg for forgiveness from a god who doesn't give a damn about you, and perhaps never did.

She reaches up, finally, to cling to the bulk of his forearms, still dizzy from the lack of oxygen as the room slowly fills out, melting into all its familiar shapes and shades.

"Shush, shush, shush," he coos. He pulls her just far enough away that he can look down at her, a string of saliva connecting her mouth to his shirt. She's embarrassed as she wipes it away with the back of her hand, sniffling. And Mr. J only cocks his head in that familiar way she used to love, only this time there is something in his eyes that frightens her, something sharp, something urgent.

"You're late, late,  _late_ ," he says, "for a very important  _date_." His voice is all honey, melodic, too sweet, the kind that leaves a sour film of sugar coating on the tongue. His thumbs brush the tears from her eyes the way a lover would, and it feels  _wrong_. He licks his lips and cups her face in his big hands, lowering his own to be closer to hers. She can smell his tacky greasepaint, fresh applied. "It's okay," he says. He rubs his nose against hers, intimate,  _sick_ , his hot, rancid breath on her face, his mouth hovering over hers in a way that might have been tempting, before. He hums under his breath and Taylor swears she can feel the vibrations of it, rippling through her insides. "I'm glad you're here now," he breathes. "But you are being  _very_  rude to our guest."

_Guest._

She whines at him and shakes her head, already beginning to pull herself away. " _No, no_ …." She knows she sounds like a baby, whimpering and pathetic, but it doesn't matter. He does not listen.

He rips her up from the floor, yanking on her upper arm until she is standing. Her thighs tremble in a way she's never felt before, and her skin prickles and overheats and she is cold and sweating and on fire, at war with her own body, and all she can do is let herself be half led, half dragged across the room. This is what it feels like to be marched to the guillotine, driven in a flaming chariot to the gates of Hell. Brought to that place that only exists in your nightmares, the one where your fears are all hidden behind a series of unmarked doors, you only have to choose which one it will be.

"Mr. J," she is reaching out for him, trying to grab hold of his sleeve, something, anything. "Mr. J,  _wait_ —"

He drags her past the beds, the dresser, the TV. She is breathing so hard and fast she thinks she's going to pass out.

Then, suddenly: the blinding white fluorescents of the bathroom, sharp and unexpected, like a papercut.

A familiar figure tied to a chair.

Nathan, with a pillowcase over his head, a rope tied around his neck to keep it in place, like a noose. He's in a pair of boxer shorts and nothing else, and Taylor can see the rivulets of sweat dripping down his chest, the trembling muscles in his arms, which have been pulled behind his back and tied to the chair.

There's a broken zip tie on the floor next to his feet, and Taylor wonders how Mr. J even got him here, what sort of force was required to bring Nathan to this exact moment, where he's helpless and defenseless and completely at their mercies.

His head lolls, this thing too heavy to burden. Chin to chest, all hunched over, looking vulnerable and pathetic. Nathan perks up at the sound of her entrance, raising his head, and he must have something lodged in his mouth to prevent him from talking, because all she can hear is his heavy, muffled breathing, something mumbled from behind a gag, something she can't make out.

Taylor makes to take a step back, but Mr. J is there behind her, the solid bulk of his presence blocking her exit. The door shuts with a definitive slam, jolting her. She nearly pisses herself.

She spins around, her hands on Mr. J's chest, grapping at the lapels of his purple jacket. "Mr. J," she whispers, desperately, "I don't want to do this anymore. I—I changed my mind," she stammers.

"Aw,  _baby_ ," he sing-songs, "don't back out on me  _now_." His voice lowers. "You're being very wishy washy about this and I don't. Like. That." He grins at her, all teeth, feral and gleaming, and she shrinks back, letting go of him, only, there is nowhere to go. "This is my  _gift_  to you, remember? I'm going to be very upset if you don't accept."

She shakes her head at him. "It's not right—"

"No," he interrupts, grabbing her suddenly, his hands on her upper arms, shaking her, "it's _necessary_." He lays his eyes into hers, holding her gaze with a force she cannot fight. "Need necessitates no choice between right and wrong, good and evil. It just  _is_. You get me?"

Taylor shakes her head again, refusing to meet his eyes. She can't afford to look at him, to grant him the power he has over her with just his eyes.

She has to get out of here. She doesn't want a part of this. Not anymore.

"Listen to me." He shuffles closer, and his grip loosens some, but she already knows she'll have the purpling bruising of his fingertips on her skin to inspect later in the mirror. "How will I know you're  _worthy_ if you won't do this? Good girls  _listen_. I told you, you  _need_ this." He pauses to reach up with one hand, caressing her face, the line of her jaw. She thinks that, at one time, she would have loved this. She would have wanted this, begged him for it, even. But right now, his touch makes her skin crawl, and she has to fight to not jerk away. "I know you're a very good girl," he says, lowly. He licks his lips, leaning forward to fit his mouth near the shell of her ear. "I know you want to do this for me, to prove that you love me. So do it.  _Show me_."

There is something sliding into her right hand. She has to look down to see what it is, and it's as if the night on the bridge comes back to her as a wave, full force, the kind of wave that drags you under and tumbles you, so that you don't know up from down, so that you're trapped and scared, can't breathe, trapped beneath the surface. Memories shouldn't have that kind of power, she thinks. Memories should not be capable of making you lose your balance. Memories should not make your gut twist and clench, like a belly full of parasites, the crunch of masticating jaws. Memories should not make fear such a tangible thing, a thing you can taste, a crawl of bile up the throat, a sour, filmy tang on the tongue.

He spins her around so she can face Nathan, then lays his hands on her shoulders, another burden she must carry.

"He's been waiting for you. He can hardly  _sit still_." She can hear the smile in his voice when he says it. She watches as Nathan squirms and writhes in the chair, trying to break free. He's still mumbling behind his gag. "Come on, come closer." Mr. J pushes her forward. She goes against her will. And there's a moment—just a moment—where she is close enough that Nathan can feel her body heat, can hear her breathing, and she watches as his own body tenses up, drawing back into the chair. He is afraid. He is afraid of  _her_.

She feels a rush of something she's never felt before, something hot and scalding and liberating. Goose bumps prickle over her skin. It's a sensation so new and foreign it's almost hard to identify at first. But she realizes this feeling rippling through her is  _power_. She cranes her neck to look back at Mr. J, wondering if he noticed, if he can feel it too.

He stares back at her as if Nathan not's even there, as if they're the only two people in the room. As if he's going to devour her.

She doesn't know why, but she derives power from that, too.

She can't help but shiver, feeling deliciously raw, like her nerve endings are all exposed. She swallows as she steps closer, wishing suddenly she could see Nathan's face, wanting to bear witness to the fear blossoming behind his eyes, the same fear she'd felt that day in his car, pinned down by him, all those hands roaming over her skin, touching the secret places of her, and the excruciating pain of being been torn in two—a pain that is still so unbearably fresh.

When she steps closer towards him now, it's as if drawn, fascinated by her own dominance, this wave of heat radiating off her. The power she derives in knowing that Nathan can feel it too.

She feels brave when she stands directly in front of him, his thighs spread open so that she can step in between them. Standing this close, knowing he can't hurt her—it thrills her in a way she never could have anticipated. Perhaps Mr. J knew it would all along. It should make her feel sick. This is  _wrong_ , after all. But she's wanted this, and he knew that she would, even if she fought him, even if she constructed weak walls of resistance.

She thinks maybe she understands what Mr. J was saying about need. She does need this.

"Take him out of the chair," she says, too fast, almost tripping over the words with how much she wants it. She looks behind her, at Mr. J. It's probably the first time she's ever given him an order, said something to him that didn't have a question mark behind it, and for a moment, she wonders if she's overstepped, if this is too much.

But he only grins, stepping past her to make quick work of the ropes, cutting them, uncaring of how he nicks Nathan's skin in the process.

She's surprised when Nathan's body slumps to the floor, right out of the chair, like he has no control over his body's mechanics. He lays on his back like a limp fish, incapable of moving his arms, his legs.

Taylor stands over him with the knife and doesn't know where to start.

She feels like a child of the woods, a varmint of Mother Nature, a malediction. Something that was birthed in the dark, something sinister and vile, something that had to be put away, hidden. Some creature of the night who has been lying in wait for this exact moment, this moment where she can finally gorge herself on the remains of naughty humans—bad people—crouched low on her haunches, sucking warm, wet blood off bones, feasting on tendons, the sharp crunch of them between her masticating jaws. The indelible hum, the thrill of human flesh.

She doesn't remember climbing on top of his prone body, straddling his waist, the way she beats, and beats, and beats on his chest, the knife forgotten. Slamming into him again and again with her fists. The fist of life _. He asked for this,_  Mr. J would fists rain down, a monsoon, a torrent of flesh on flesh. The skin doesn't bruise immediately, and it makes her angry, because all she is is this leftover canvas of purple and yellow and blue, these lingering marks of violence that won't heal, skin that is too tender to touch. She beats some more. She's not sure if she's shouting or if she just imagines that she is. Her anger blinds her, or maybe that's just her tears, hot and salty, burning her eyes. She can't see. He just lies there and takes it. He has no choice.

She wonders if he knows it's her. Maybe he recognized her voice early on. Maybe the fear incapacitated him to the degree where he can't really hear at all. Maybe he recognizes the feel of her body, even if their positions are reversed. She hopes that he does. She wants him to know that it's her. She wants him to know why he's being punished.

With a sob that sounds like it's been torn from her, she collapses against him, exhausted, sweating. Tears streaming down her face.

She feels him shift beneath the weight of her, just slight—he has no strength to do much else—and she is suddenly disgusted to be lying on top of him. Her skin crawls in all the places where they touch, and she pushes herself up, breathing shallowly, out of breath from the exertion of her fury.

She is still leaning forward over his body, her thighs bracketing his waist, her arms on either side of his head. She knows she must look deranged, looming over him like this, her sharpened canines on display, the carnality in her eyes, like something undomesticated and feral.

As her final act, she loosens the rope around his neck, slides the pillowcase off, over his head. She doesn't ask Mr. J if that's okay, and he doesn't move to stop her.

The shock of seeing his face is sobering in a way she hadn't expected. Tears stream down his face, unhindered. The gag in his mouth is saturated with spit, and drool is dripping from the corners of his mouth, his neck and shirt soaked with it. He's sporting an impressive black eye—a gift from Mr. J, no doubt. And the fear in his eyes doesn't taste as good as she thought it would, especially when the fear transforms into recognition, and then confusion.

She wipes the tears from her face with the back of her hand. "You won't  _ever_  touch me again," she whispers. She shoves on his chest for good measure, and there is some satisfaction in seeing him flinch.

"No." Mr. J's voice above her startles her. She looks up to see him crouching down next to her, a knife in his hands, this one different, this one longer and thinner and sharper. He offers it to her. "No, he won't."

She hesitates at the proffered item. Her eyes flicker back to Nathan, to where he watches her with wide eyes, still under the effects of whatever Mr. J drugged him with. He thrashes his head back and forth uselessly, the only thing he has any control over. She stares at him, knowing he's been broken, that there is no more damage to inflict. She thought she would feel satisfied, having taken her revenge, having made him hurt, but all she feels now is hollow. She wants no more. Looking at the pain in his eyes, all she feels is sick.

"I—I'm done. No more," she says.

"Done?  _Done_?" Mr. J laughs, high pitched and nasal, a sound that crawls right under her skin and makes her itch. "He's still  _breathing_."

Taylor's head snaps up to look at him, realization prickling over her skin. "You said we were going to hurt him. You didn't—" her eyes drift to Nathan again, where he is begging for mercy with his eyes, mumbling around his gag. Her eyes flicker back to Mr. J's. "—You didn't say we were going to  _kill_  him." She can barely force the words out from behind the gates of her teeth, like just speaking the words into existence is enough to accomplish the deed.

He stares at her. "What did you  _think_ was going to happen? You thought you were going to hit him a couple of times, make him cry, make him beg for you to stop, and then send him on his way with a  _warning_?" Mr. J laughs without any mirth. "This only ends one way."

She shakes her head. "I don't want to," she whispers. More unshed tears burn at her eyes. "Please, please don't make me."

Mr. J slides up behind her before she can get away, tucking the length of his body against her back. They're both straddling Nathan now. The feel of him behind her like this sends her brain skidding to a halt, like a cartridge caught in a groove. That one memory she can never let go of, startlingly clear, not even the long, arduous passage of time could have cast a shadowy veil over it. It's pristine in detail, the way she can see just the two of them knelt on the floor, the body spread out on the bathroom tile. Even the location is the same. It's like he's purposely recreating that memory just for the two of them.

He takes her hand and curls it around the knife, which she now recognizes as a scalpel.

"Feels familiar, doesn't it?" He knows. Of course he knows. He sighs against her neck, his breath fanning out the hairs there. "Oh, you're doing so  _good_  so far," he murmurs, just so she can hear. Pleasure ripples down her spine at his praise. She can't help it. It's what she's wanted from him all this time, even though she knows she shouldn't. He loops his forearm around her middle, pulling her tighter against him, so she can feel every part of him. She likes that too, even if there is something inside of her that screams that she should be repulsed by him, something that is suddenly at war with everything she thought she loved about him. "Don't stop now," he urges. "I'll help you." And then his hand is on hers, helping her guide the scalpel. His breath hot and humid on the shell of her ear. "We'll go right down the middle."

It's his hand guiding the knife, she tells herself amidst her growing hysteria. She has no control over where he guides the knife. She makes the mistake of looking up at Nathan as the blade is about to touch done. A mixture of snot and drools and tears sliding down his neck, beads of sweat gathered along his forehead. His desperate, muffled begging for them to stop. She never could have imagined him like this, on the precipice of breaking, the very same precipice he brought her to only days ago. It should feel just, what they're doing to him, but she surprises herself by discovering that she feels sorry for him, even as she hates him. The two emotions converge in a way that is complicated and confusing. She wants to try and explain it to Mr. J, maybe he could understand. But the wheels are already in motion, and there is no way to stop something that is barreling forward with this much force.

That is what she thinks about as the blade comes down, against her will, sliding through layers of flesh as easily as a knife tears through paper. Nathan's back arches off the floor and he screams through his gag. Taylor wants to yell too, but her voice only catches on a sob that's lodged somewhere high in her throat. She tries to close her eyes, so desperate to look away, but his body cavity is opening up, split from sternum to naval, and it's Biblical and riveting, like the parting of the Red Sea.

The cut is not that deep, not really, but it's too much all the same, and the amount of blood that pours out in rivulets is horrifying. Taylor can feel the vibrations of Mr. J's laughter rolling along her back, but she can't hear anything at all. She feels like a soldier on a battlefield after a bomb's just exploded, and all she is left with is this incessant ringing in her ears.

He lets go of her hand, his arm unwinding from around her waist, and she falls forward without his support, catching herself at the last second, her hands slip-sliding on Nathan's chest, in all his blood. She cries out, trying to sit up, but Mr. J's weight is heavy on her back, forcing her to bend at the waist, so she's lying on top of Nathan, so she can feel his warm blood soaking through her shirt.

"Aaaall the old familiar places, hm?"

He wants this to feel familiar, she realizes, wants her to think of the first time they did this together, even though everything is so different now. Now, she is armed with a reason, with justification for her cruelty. But he's severely misjudged the depth of her compassion, and she can't go through with the punishment. She won't.

Taylor sobs as the blood spills out. She wants to shout, scream, make some sort of noise that would alert somebody out in the hall, in the neighboring room, perhaps, if anyone is even there, but she can't suck in enough air to produce any noise. She just gapes with her mouth open, feels as though the wind has been knocked out of her, like her lungs are caught in a spasm.

He allows her the mercy of catching her breath, and when she does, she is struggling to get out from underneath him,

"I don't want to do this anymore!" she shouts. "Let me up!  _Please_!" Her voice cracks on her plea, and Mr. J smiles against her neck.

"Shush, shush, shush," he coos. "We're just getting started, sweetheart."

Nathan's blood soaks through Taylor's shirt, all warm and wet and slippery, and Taylor sobs, open-mouthed, and fights with everything she has to get away.

"I said let me  _go_!" she screams, finally able to find her voice. Her tears feel hot sliding down her face as she rears her elbow back and catches Mr. J square in the jaw. It's enough to knock him back slightly, to relieve some of his weight that was holding her down, and she crawls off of Nathan and slides herself backwards on her elbows, edging herself beneath the sink, shaking so hard she knows she wouldn't be able to stand.

Mr. J is rubbing is jaw, working his mouth from side to side, as if she'd loosened something he needs to pop back into place. When he looks up at her, still kneeling over Nathan's prone form—his head bowed lowed, staring at her from beneath his brows—the look is so feral that it sends a frisson of fear shooting straight down her spine. She instinctively draws further under the sink, making herself as small as she can.

"You need a reminder of why we're all gathered here, don't you?" he growls.

Taylor doesn't know what he means by that. She shakes her head at him and then draws her knees to her chest, burying her face there, trying not to look at Nathan, at what she's done. She dares to peek over the bent valley of her kneecaps and sees all his pooling blood on the tile, settling into all the cracks and grooves as if to make a home there. Then she makes the mistake of raising her eyes farther up.

Mr. J, crawling towards her on hands and knees. His eyes dark and glittering, hands leaving a trail of bloodied prints in his wake, like a beast straight from her worst nightmare.

"Come to daddy."

"Don't!" she screams, but his hand, stained and wet with blood, is already around her ankle, pulling her out from underneath the sink. She slides across the tile, screaming, and he wrestles her until she's pinned underneath him, holding her down with one hand, the other searching inside the interior of his breast pocket, maybe wanting another knife.

She frowns up at him, panting, but goes still when he produces a cell phone.

"You think you can't kill him," he pants, he's doing something with the phone she can't see, "but you just need a friendly reminder. Just a little  _push_." He grunts as he readjusts his position to pin her underneath him better, applying more weight, fitting himself over her thighs so she can't move her legs. " _Look_ ," he orders.

At first, she doesn't. She fights him, turning her head away, her cheek pressed to the cold tile as he holds the cell phone above her. She is determined not to give him the satisfaction of obeying—but then she can hear the crackle of a video starting, the jostle of a camera and poor sound quality she's come to recognize as homemade videos. It's accompanied by laughter that sounds familiar for some reason, laughter that makes her skin prickle. And… the words from a familiar voice.

_Gonna fucking ruin you._

Her blood runs cold.

In the video, she hears herself scream.

_Please, please don't do this! I'll do anything!_

She jerks her neck forward to look, hating that she has to see, but unable to stop herself.

Her shorts ripped down, Nathan's cock just as he forces himself in. Her bloodcurdling scream. She looks away. Can't breathe. But it's not because of the contents of the video. Her eyes slide up to meet Mr. J's.

"How do you—" Her chest rises and falls with her growing panic, her disbelief. Tears slide down her face, slow and unhurried. "Where did you get that?" Something inside of her has opened up, a truth she had always known but would not allow herself to believe. Too horrifying to even consider. Too wrong.

_I only let it go as far as I allowed it to._

Just how much of this had he fabricated? How much of her suffering was by the calculated design of his own hands? "Did you know?" she cries. "Did you—did you plan this?" She hears her voice crack at the end, and she has to wipe her tears away with the back of her hand so she can see him clearly. He doesn't respond right away, looking at her with his head cocked, his eyes dark and unreadable, and it's under this careful scrutiny, this piercing stare, that she explodes. "DID YOU KNOW?" she screams. Her hands are balled into fists at her sides. Her whole body is trembling with a kind of fury she's never felt before. She scrambles out from underneath him, forgetting about Nathan, forgetting about everything but this sharp, stabbing pang of betrayal.

She backs herself against the closed door, hyperventilating, staring at Mr. J, seeing him as the monster he really is.

All this time, all this trust she had placed in him. She… she'd actually  _loved_ him. She had given that to him. She had given him parts of herself she had never given anyone before. She had given him  _everything_.

She stares at him, a million questions printed on her tongue, clinging to the roof of her mouth, coiled like a spring in her throat. She doesn't even know where to start. There is no question that can accurately capture the depth of her despair, no question that leads anywhere other than straight to the foul, rotten truth.

He rises to his knees, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, smearing blood. Grins.

She feels hot all over, suddenly, boiling, like something about to break open and burst, something that's been left too long on the stove and is about to burn, the water all dried up.

"I hate you," she says, just whisper at first, but then her legs tremble, and her whole body is shaking. She can feel her nostrils flaring with the intensity of her anger. " _I HATE YOU_!" she screams.

She lunges for him. He must not be expecting her, or maybe he is, and he just doesn't put up any resistance to stop her. She knocks him on his back with her weight, and then she is clawing at his face with her bare hands, snarling, crying, trying to reach him, trying to hurt him. And he is laughing,  _laughing_  at her, shaking with the intensity of it, like this is the funniest thing in the world, like he hasn't just broken her heart, creating a chasm right down the middle, like he hasn't caused her insufferable amounts of pain. It's all him. It's been him from the beginning.

"You don't hate me," he says between wheezes of laughter. "You don't hate me at all." He grabs her suddenly, flipping their positions so that she's flat on her back, trapped underneath him. The curtain of his hair blocks out the light as he leans down over her. "You  _love_ me," he breathes, shaking her. "That's what's so  _funny_."

Taylor turns her face away, squeezing her eyes shut tight, wishing this was all a bad dream, wishing she could wake from this nightmare that is her life. Every truth she's ever held about the two of them, every hope she clung to for their shared future, it was all built on a filthy lie that he sold to her over and over, and over again, without shame, without conscience.

She sobs without restraint, and he takes the opportunity to nuzzle into the side of her neck, nosing at the rapid pulsing of her carotid artery, so beautifully exposed to him.

"You do love me," he says. "You will always love me, no matter what I do."

"No.  _No_ , that's not true," she cries.

She still won't look at him, so he lowers himself even closer, his face hovering over hers. She does turn to look at him then, overwhelmed by him, seeing that, even through her blur of tears, he's looking at her lips, and her heart short circuits when he presses his own to the corner of her open mouth. Not a kiss, not really, just his open mouth on her skin, tasting her, her heart slamming up against her ribcage. Maybe he can taste that, too.

He lets out a sound that sounds like a growl. "Open your mouth," he says, and Taylor's so dizzy from the heat of him, she doesn't understand what it is that he is asking, what he wants. She turns her face further away instead, disobeying, and he grabs her by the back of her neck and sinks his nails into the tender flesh there. She gasps involuntarily, jerking her head back, skull hitting tile.

It hurts, and it's exactly what he wants as he dives towards her, down, forcing his tongue inside her open mouth, licking the roof of it, running his tongue along her rows of teeth, laving at the insides of her mouth like an animal that's been starved for days. It's nasty. There is no finesse, just his urgent desire, eating her up, taking this little bit more from her that she hadn't yet given to him. She whines and tries to close her mouth, push him away, but he hooks a finger behind her lower rows of teeth and wrenches her mouth further open so he can continue his ministrations. His heavy breathing and the sounds their wet mouths make should repulse her, it  _does_ repulse her, but there is something else, too, something warm coiling in her lower belly, this thing she's never felt before.

_Some people want it._

She doesn't know what this feeling is, or why it feels so good when he slides his thigh in between her legs, and she squirms against the pressure, creating accidental friction, and for some reason that feels good, too.

He removes his finger from her mouth, slotting his lips over hers, and for some reason she doesn't fight him, even though she knows she should. She's always wanted this. She's dreamt about it—not quite like this, in her fantasies it was always more tender, soft—but being the product of his lust, his desire, it takes her breath away.

She kisses him back. At least she thinks she does. She's never done this before. She kisses him like she has something to prove, like she's hungry, too, like his mouth is her battlefield and she is not done wreaking bloodshed. He feeds his tongue into her mouth and groans, and she reaches up—having half a mind to push him away, but instead she grips the lapels of his jacket, needing something to hang onto, to ground herself with.

Their teeth crash and it's ugly and wrong and she's still crying, and she thinks she can taste the salt of her own tears in her mouth. But she supposes it's fitting he should take this from her—the innocence of her first kiss—since he's already taken everything else. Maybe he was meant to have this, too.

When he pulls back, she is breathless and dizzy. He tongues at the little y-shaped scar on his lower lip, his breathing shallow. His lips are all wet, the whites of his eyes gone. She can't imagine how she must look to him.

"You really will let me do anything, won't you?"

She throws her head back and cries out, furious, disoriented, arching her body up to get away, but he doesn't budge.

"Why?" she shouts, crying so hard. "I just want to know  _why_!"

His weight shifts on top of her, where he straddles her hips. His bloodied hands are cupping her face, her jaw, and she has to fight back the bile that wants to creep up her throat.

" _Taylor_." Her eyes snap up to his. She's never heard him say her name before, not since… not since before, when she was a child. The way he says it now is both sobering and mesmerizing. He cups her face in his hands and she is riveted. "I  _told_  you, this is my gift. Everything I did was for  _you_. To _save_  you."

"NO! You're lying! Everything you've said to me has been a lie!"

"You are not. Seeing. The bigger.  _Picture_ ," he snarls. "You are  _nothing_  without me." He shifts his weight above her, and she takes the opportunity to suck in a breath, trying to get air back into lungs. "Nothing without my guiding hand. You  _will_ be nothing, if you don't finish this."

In the background, the video is still playing—she had forgotten it momentarily—but now the sounds of Taylor begging for mercy, screaming over and over again, seem to reverberate off the bathroom walls. The disgusting sounds of Nathan's groans, his skin slapping against hers.

"Come on," he urges. She gasps when he licks a hot stripe up the side of her neck, over her pulse point."Finish it.  _Ruin him_."

They both turn to look at Nathan, still very much alive, his chest heaving, split open, so pale beneath the lights, almost luminescent. He's trying to look at the two of them. She can't imagine what he must be thinking.

She shakes her head. Has to look away. Nathan's already dead, one way or the other. She is too ashamed of the significance of her role already. She wants no more part in this.

"I can't, I  _can't_ ," she sobs.

* * *

The Joker exhales, heavy. He was hoping that it wasn't going to have to come to this.

The video did not fulfill its intended purpose—but that's okay. It's better that she knows the truth, here, at the end. Better that she knows that it was him all along, pulling her strings, knows that he was the one who so meticulously stitched those threads into her skin, one by one by one, until there were enough for him to gather into a fist, so that he can play her like a marionette, bending and animating her exactly as he wants her. No need to operate under false pretenses anymore; he knows her love for him is unrefined, _unconditional_. A love so deep-rooted, so heavily ingrained, there is nothing he can do to take it away.

 _That_  is power.

There's a rush to tell her everything, all the sudden, to see just how far he can take this, how far he can push her. And oh, the  _horror_  on her face when he tells her the big truth:  _I_  killed your mother, the only living family member you had left. Taylor might not believe him, not at first, but he's kept the memory fresh for years for this specific purpose, and he knows he'd be able to rewind the clock, describe the scene to her in all its gory, excruciating detail. But he thinks he'll give this to her later, save it for another time, something else he can store in his arsenal of weaponry to utilize against her.

"I can't, I  _can't_ ," she sobs, over and over. "I don't want to!"

He is tired of her blubbering.

"Then I'll make you," he snarls.

He reaches for with an intensity that takes her off guard. Grabbing onto the collar of her shirt—warm, soaked with blood—he manhandles her into a kneeling position next to Nathan's body once more. Nathan, who was so easily coaxed into the Joker's web, all he had to do was take the existing seed of the idea and water it, set it in the windowsill and wait for the sun. It didn't take long, the birth of this ugly, festering weed.

Kneeling next to the body like this, Taylor crying as she tries to fight him off, all he can do is shudder from the warm familiarity of it.

"Just like old times," he whispers to her, knowing that she remembers too.

He fits the knife in her hand. No more stalling. He curls his hand around hers, making her hold it, but her strength surprises him, her adrenaline kicking into high gear.

She thrusts her elbow back, into his abdomen, while it's sudden and unexpected, it doesn't hurt. It does, though, make him pull back some, awarding her the leverage to do it again, this time higher, this time her elbow soaring into his solar plexus. He grunts as he falls backwards, and she pushes herself up, crying. He knows she'll go for the door.

He lunges for her, for a leg, for an ankle. Fingers brush against soft flesh. Misses.

She throws open the door with a gasp, gone. He is not smiling as he rears up and goes after her.

It's dark in the bedroom, and the only light is the fluorescents that come pouring out of the bathroom. The fresh air is fortifying, the stink of metallics and sweat momentarily removed.

She is by the sliding glass door, trying to open it, but it must be jammed on the runner because she cannot get it to budge. She turns to him at the last second and ducks out of his way when he lunges for her. He catches her around the waist as she ducks low. She screams, and the force of their sudden movements sends them both crashing to the carpet. Both of them landing on their fronts, with him on top of her.

Taylor lets out a gasp that sounds sharp and wet. Not right. There are words in his mouth as he gets off of her, angrily flips her onto her back—but whatever he was going to say falls away as he looks at her, looks at the knife, wedged in her lower abdomen.

It's almost as if it isn't real, the absurdity of seeing a knife sticking up, this foreign protrusion wedged inside her flesh where it doesn't belong.

She looks down at it herself, seeing for the first time, and he thinks there must not be any pain from the way she is looking at is, as if curious. Intrigued. She looks up to gauge his reaction. And then she moves to reach for it, to remove the knife from her stomach, he thinks, and he slaps her hand away. She'll kill herself if she pulls it out.

"Don't," he snarls. Something catches in his throat when he says it. Christ.

He's angry—frantic—as he shrugs out of his jacket and uses it to apply pressure to the wound, using both hands.

She frowns at him, confused. "You knew it was going to end this way, didn't you? This is—this is what you wanted."

It takes him a moment to compose himself enough for an answer. There's so much blood.

" _No_ ," he growls. "No, it's not what I wanted." He spits out the words as if they disgust him. And then he looks at her, pointed, needing her to understand this is not how it was supposed to end. Not like this.

And then, bizarrely, as if she had expected this all along, she finds the strength to smile at him. She huffs out a little laugh, but it's hard, like there's something bubbling in her throat.

"Then… then I took something from you, too," she pants, smiling, because it's so funny. Because she knows she is going to die.

He doesn't say anything, just presses harder.

He can feel her studying him closely in the dim lighting, the soft warmth of her eyes, taking him in, memorizing his face, her tender vulnerability bleeding out, all over him. She is so calm, even as her chest heaves, and he can tell she is starting to feel it now, the shock wearing off.

He wants to shout at her, berate her for her fucking stupidity. He needs to call someone. His cell phone is in the bathroom. He needs to stop the bleeding. He needs to position her so the blood drains back to her heart. He needs sutures. Peroxide.

"Mr. J?" she says, and here comes the blood, sliding out of her mouth, down her chin. It won't stop. He can't stop it. "You were right about one thing," she whispers, her voice so weak, something broken, something that cannot be fixed. Her eyes are starting to flutter shut, and he applies more pressure, panting. Somewhere, there's the sound of sirens in the distance. He grunts as he shifts closer, as if his presence alone can breathe life back into her.

"I—I will always love you." She forces herself to look up at him as she says it, holding onto his eyes. "And now you'll never get to see."

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes places eleven years after Clockwork. It is an AU where Blackout doesn't exist. 
> 
> It is not necessary to read Clockwork in order to read this story, although if you're interested in Taylor and the Joker's original history, Clockwork can be found under my pen name, HoistTheColours, on fanfiction.net.


End file.
